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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Mummer's Tale, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Mummer's Tale
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Translator: Charles E. Roche
+
+Release Date: June 9, 2006 [EBook #18545]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MUMMER'S TALE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Verity White, Henry Craig and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
+IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
+EDITED BY J. LEWIS MAY AND
+BERNARD MIALL
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+(HISTOIRE COMIQUE)
+
+
+
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+BY ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+A TRANSLATION BY
+CHARLES E. ROCHE
+
+LONDON, JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMXXI
+
+WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                   PAGE
+
+    I.                                       1
+
+   II.                                      21
+
+  III.                                      26
+
+   IV.                                      41
+
+    V.                                      63
+
+   VI.                                      71
+
+  VII.                                      82
+
+ VIII.                                      97
+
+   IX.                                     108
+
+    X.                                     137
+
+   XI.                                     166
+
+  XII.                                     176
+
+ XIII.                                     181
+
+  XIV.                                     186
+
+   XV.                                     194
+
+  XVI.                                     197
+
+ XVII.                                     205
+
+XVIII.                                     212
+
+  XIX.                                     220
+
+   XX.                                     230
+
+
+
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+
+
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The scene was an actress's dressing-room at the Odéon.
+
+Félicie Nanteuil, her hair powdered, with blue on her eyelids, rouge on
+her cheeks and ears, and white on her neck and shoulders, was holding
+out her foot to Madame Michon, the dresser, who was fitting on a pair of
+little black slippers with red heels. Dr. Trublet, the physician
+attached to the theatre, and a friend of the actress's, was resting his
+bald cranium on a cushion of the divan, his hands folded upon his
+stomach and his short legs crossed.
+
+"What else, my dear?" he inquired of her.
+
+"Oh, I don't know! Fits of suffocation; giddiness; and, all of a sudden,
+an agonizing pain, as if I were going to die. That's the worst of all."
+
+"Do you sometimes feel as though you must laugh or cry for no apparent
+reason, about nothing at all?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you, for in this life one has so many reasons for
+laughing or crying!"
+
+"Are you subject to attacks of dizziness?"
+
+"No. But, just think, doctor, at night, I see an imaginary cat, under
+the chairs or the table, gazing at me with fiery eyes!"
+
+"Try not to dream of cats any more," said Madame Michon, "because that's
+a bad omen. To see a cat is a sign that you'll be betrayed by friends,
+or deceived by a woman."
+
+"But it is not in my dreams that I see a cat! It's when I'm wide awake!"
+
+Trublet, who was in attendance at the Odéon once a month only, was given
+to looking in as a friend almost every evening. He was fond of the
+actresses, delighted in chatting with them, gave them good advice, and
+listened with delicacy to their confidences. He promised Félicie that he
+would write her a prescription at once.
+
+"We'll attend to the stomach, my dear child, and you'll see no more cats
+under the chairs and tables."
+
+Madame Michon was adjusting the actress's stays. The doctor, suddenly
+gloomy, watched her tugging at the laces.
+
+"Don't scowl," said Félicie. "I am never tight-laced. With my waist I
+should surely be a fool if I were." And she added, thinking of her best
+friend in the theatre, "It's all very well for Fagette, who has no
+shoulders and no hips; she's simply straight up and down. Michon, you
+can pull a little tighter still. I know you are no lover of waists,
+doctor. Nevertheless, I cannot wear swaddling bands like those æsthetic
+creatures. Just slip your hand into my stays, and you'll see that I
+don't squeeze myself too tight."
+
+He denied that he was inimical to stays; he only condemned them when too
+tightly laced. He deplored the fact that women should have no sense of
+the harmony of line; that they should associate with smallness of the
+waist an idea of grace and beauty, not realizing that their beauty
+resided wholly in those modulations through which the body, having
+displayed the superb expansion of chest and bosom, tapers off gradually
+below the thorax, to glorify itself in the calm and generous width of
+the flanks.
+
+"The waist," he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that
+hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from
+one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you
+stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the
+breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a
+horrible furrow above the navel. The negresses, who file their teeth
+down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a wooden disc,
+disfigure themselves in a less barbarous fashion. For, after all, some
+feminine splendour still remains to a creature who wears rings in the
+cartilage of her nose, and whose lip is distended by a circular disc of
+mahogany as big as this pomade pot. But the devastation is complete when
+woman carries her ravages into the sacred centre of her empire."
+
+Dwelling upon a favourite subject, he enumerated one by one the
+deformities of the bones and muscles caused by the wearing of stays, in
+terms now fanciful, now precise, now droll, now lugubrious.
+
+Nanteuil laughed as she listened. She laughed because, being a woman,
+she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty;
+because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and
+actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her
+of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a
+caricature. Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted in
+her own young body as she pictured to herself all these indignities of
+the flesh. With a ringing laugh she crossed the dressing-room towards
+the doctor, dragging with her Madame Michon, who was holding on to her
+stay-laces as though they were reins, with the look of a sorceress being
+whisked away to a witches' sabbath.
+
+"Don't be afraid!" she said.
+
+And she objected that peasant women, who never wore stays, had far
+worse figures than town-bred women.
+
+The doctor bitterly inveighed against the Western civilizations because
+of their contempt for and ignorance of natural beauty.
+
+Trublet, born within the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, had gone as a young
+man to practise in Cairo. He brought back from that city a little money,
+a liver complaint, and a knowledge of the various customs of humanity.
+When at a ripe age, he returned to his own country, he rarely strayed
+from his ancient Rue de Seine, thoroughly enjoying his life, save that
+it depressed him a trifle to see how little able his contemporaries were
+to realize the deplorable misunderstandings which for eighteen centuries
+had kept humanity at cross-purposes with nature.
+
+There was a tap at the door.
+
+"It's only me!" exclaimed a woman's voice in the passage.
+
+Félicie, slipping on her pink petticoat, begged the doctor to open the
+door.
+
+Enter Madame Doulce, a lady who was allowing her massive person to run
+to seed, although she had long contrived to hold it together on the
+boards, compelling it to assume the dignity proper to aristocratic
+mothers.
+
+"Well, my dear! How-d'ye-do, doctor! Félicie, you know I am not one to
+pay compliments. Nevertheless, I saw you the day before yesterday, and I
+assure you that in the second of _La Mère confidente_ you put in some
+excellent touches, which are far from easy to bring off."
+
+Nanteuil, with smiling eyes, waited--as is always the case when one has
+received a compliment--for another.
+
+Madame Doulce, thus invited by Nanteuil's silence, murmured some
+additional words of praise:
+
+"...excellent touches, genuinely individual business!"
+
+"You really think so, Madame Doulce? Glad to hear it, for I don't feel
+the part. And then that great Perrin woman upsets me altogether. It is a
+fact. When I sit on the creature's knees, it makes me feel as if----You
+don't know all the horrors that she whispers into my ear while we are on
+the stage! She's crazy! I understand everything, but there are some
+things which disgust me. Michon, don't my stays crease at the back, on
+the right?"
+
+"My dear child," cried Trublet with enthusiasm, "you have just said
+something that is really admirable."
+
+"What?" inquired Nanteuil simply.
+
+"You said: 'I understand everything, but there are some things which
+disgust me.' You understand everything; the thoughts and actions of men
+appear to you as particular instances of the universal mechanics, but in
+respect of them you cherish neither hatred nor anger. But there are
+things which disgust you; you have a fastidious taste, and it is
+profoundly true that morals are a matter of taste. My child, I could
+wish that the Academy of Moral Science thought as sanely as you. Yes.
+You are quite right. As regards the instincts which you attribute to
+your fellow-actress, it is as futile to blame her for them as to blame
+lactic acid for being an acid possessing mixed properties."
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+"I am saying that we can no longer assign praise or blame to any human
+thought or action, once the inevitable nature of such thoughts and
+actions has been proved for us."
+
+"So you approve of the morals of that gawk of a Perrin, do you? You, a
+member of the Legion of Honour! A nice thing, to be sure!"
+
+The doctor heaved himself up.
+
+"My child," he said, "give me a moment's attention; I am going to tell
+you an instructive story:
+
+"In times gone by, human nature was other than it is to-day. There were
+then not men and women only, but also hermaphrodites; in other words,
+beings in whom the two sexes were combined. These three kinds of human
+beings possessed four arms, four legs, and two faces. They were robust
+and rotated rapidly on their own axes, just like wheels. Their strength
+inspired them with audacity to war with the gods, therein following the
+example of the Giants, Jupiter, unable to brook such insolence----"
+
+"Michon, doesn't my petticoat hang too low on the left?" asked Nanteuil.
+
+"Resolved," continued the doctor, "to render them less strong and less
+daring. He divided each into two, so that they had now but two arms, two
+legs, and one head apiece, and thenceforward the human race became what
+it is to-day. Consequently, each of us is only the half of a human
+being, divided from the other half, just as one divides a sole into two
+portions. These halves are ever seeking their other halves. The love
+which we experience for one another is nothing but an invisible force
+impelling us to reunite our two halves in order to re-establish
+ourselves in our pristine perfection. Those men who result from the
+divisions of hermaphrodites love women; those women who have a similar
+origin love men. But the women who proceed from the division of
+primitive women do not bestow much attention upon men, but are drawn
+toward their own sex. So do not be astonished when you see----"
+
+"Did you invent that precious story, doctor?" inquired Nanteuil, pinning
+a rose in her bodice.
+
+The doctor protested that he had not invented a word of it. On the
+contrary, he had, he said, left out part of the story.
+
+"So much the better?" exclaimed Nanteuil. "For I must tell you that the
+person who did invent it is not particularly brilliant."
+
+"He is dead," remarked Trublet.
+
+Nanteuil once more expressed her disgust of her fellow-actress, but
+Madame Doulce, who was prudent and occasionally took _déjeuner_ with
+Jeanne Perrin, changed the subject.
+
+"Well, my darling, so you've got the part of Angélique. Only remember
+what I told you: your gestures should be somewhat restrained, and you
+yourself a little stiff. That is the secret of the _ingénue_. Beware of
+your charming natural suppleness. Young girls in a 'stock' piece ought
+to be just a trifle doll-like. It's good form. The costume requires it.
+You see, Félicie, what you must do above all, when you are playing in
+_La Mère confidente_, which is a delightful play----"
+
+"Oh," interrupted Félicie, "so long as I have a good part, I don't care
+a fig for the play. Besides, I am not particularly in love with
+Marivaux----What are you laughing at, doctor? Have I put my foot in it?
+Isn't _La Mère confidente_ by Marivaux?"
+
+"To be sure it is!"
+
+"Well, then? You are always trying to muddle me. I was saying that
+Angélique gets on my nerves. I should prefer a part with more meat in
+it, something out of the ordinary. This evenings especially, the part
+gives me the creeps."
+
+"All the more likely that you'll do well in it, my pet," said Madame
+Doulce. "We never enter more thoroughly into our parts than when we do
+so by main force, and in spite of ourselves. I could give you many
+examples. I myself, in _La Vivandière d'Austerlitz_, staggered the house
+by my gaiety of tone, when I had just been informed that my Doulce, so
+great an artist and so good a husband, had had an epileptic fit in the
+orchestra at the Odéon, just as he was picking up his cornet."
+
+"Why do they insist on my being nothing but an _ingénue_?" inquired
+Nanteuil, who wanted to play the woman in love, the brilliant coquette,
+and every part a woman could play.
+
+"That is quite natural," persisted Madame Doulce. "Comedy is an
+imitative art; and you imitate an art all the better for not feeling it
+yourself."
+
+"Do not delude yourself, my child," said the doctor to Félicie. "Once an
+_ingénue_, always an _ingénue_. You are born an Angélique or a Dorine, a
+Célimène or a Madame Pernelle. On the stage, some women are always
+twenty, others are always thirty, others again are always sixty. As for
+you, Mademoiselle Nanteuil, you will always be eighteen, and you will
+always be an _ingénue_."
+
+"I am quite content with my work," replied Nanteuil, "but you cannot
+expect me to play all _ingénues_ with the same pleasure. There is one
+part, for example, which I long to play, and that is Agnès in _L'École
+des femmes_."
+
+At the mere mention of the name of Agnès, the doctor murmured
+delightedly from among his cushions:
+
+  "Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"
+
+"Agnès, that's a part if you like!" exclaimed Nanteuil. "I have asked
+Pradel to give it me."
+
+Pradel, the manager of the theatre, was an ex-comedian, a wideawake,
+genial fellow, who had got rid of his illusions and nourished no
+exaggerated hopes. He loved peace, books and women. Nanteuil had every
+reason to speak well of Pradel, and she referred to him without any
+feeling of ill will, and with frank directness.
+
+"It was shameful, disgusting, rotten of him," she said. "He wouldn't let
+me play Agnès and gave the part to Falempin. I must say, though, that
+when I asked him I didn't go the right way about it. While she knows how
+to tackle him, if you like! But what do I care! If Pradel doesn't let
+me play Agnès, he can go to the deuce, and his dirty Punch and Judy show
+too!"
+
+Madame Doulce continued to lavish her unheeded precepts. She was an
+actress of merits but she was old and worn out, and no longer obtained
+any engagements. She gave advice to beginners, wrote their letters for
+them, and thus, in the morning or evenings earned what was almost every
+day her only meal.
+
+"Doctor," asked Félicie, while Madame Michon was fastening a black
+velvet ribbon round her neck: "You say that my fits of dizziness are due
+to my stomach. Are you sure of that?"
+
+Before Trublet could answer, Madame Doulce exclaimed that fits of
+dizziness always proceeded from the stomach, and that two or three hours
+after meals she experienced a feeling of distension in hers, and she
+thereupon asked the doctor for a remedy.
+
+Félicie, however, was thinking, for she was capable of thought.
+
+"Doctor," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question, which you
+may possibly think a droll one; but I do really want to know whether,
+considering that you know just what there is in the human body, and that
+you have seen all the things we have inside us, it doesn't embarrass
+you, at certain moments, in your dealings with women?  It seems to me
+that the idea of all that must disgust you."
+
+From the depths of his cushions Trublet, wafting a kiss to Félicie,
+replied:
+
+"My dear child, there is no more exquisitely delicate, rich, and
+beautiful tissue than the skin of a pretty woman. That is what I was
+telling myself just now, while contemplating the back of your neck, and
+you will readily understand that, under such an impression----"
+
+She made a grimace at him like that of a disdainful monkey.
+
+"You think it witty, I suppose, to talk nonsense when anyone asks you a
+serious question?"
+
+"Well, then, since you wish it, mademoiselle, you shall have an
+instructive answer. Some twenty years ago we had, in the post-mortem
+room at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph, a drunken old watchman, named Daddy
+Rousseau, who every day at eleven o'clock used to lunch at the end of
+the table on which the corpse was lying. He ate his lunch because he was
+hungry. Nothing prevents people who are hungry from eating as soon as
+they have got something to eat. Only Daddy Rousseau used to say: 'I
+don't know whether it is because of the atmosphere of the room, but I
+must have something fresh and appetizing.'"
+
+"I understand," said Félicie. "Little flower-girls are what you want.
+But you mustn't, you know. And there you are seated like a Turk and you
+haven't written out my prescription yet." She cast an inquiring glance
+at him. "Where is the stomach exactly?"
+
+The door had remained ajar. A young man, a very pretty fellow and
+extremely fashionable, pushed it open, and, having taken a couple of
+steps into the dressing-room, inquired politely whether he might come
+in.
+
+"Oh, it's you!" said Nanteuil. And she stretched out her hand, which he
+kissed with pleasure, ceremony and fatuity.
+
+"How are you, Doctor Socrates?" he inquired, without wasting any
+particular courtesies on Madame Doulce.
+
+Trublet was often accosted in this manner, because of his snub-nose and
+his subtle speech. Pointing to Nanteuil, he said:
+
+"Monsieur de Ligny, you see before you a young lady who is not quite
+sure whether she has a stomach. It is a serious question. We advise her
+to refer, for the answer, to the little girl who ate too much jam. Her
+mother said to her: 'You will injure your stomach.' The child replied:
+'It's only ladies who have stomachs; little girls haven't any.'"
+
+"Heavens, how silly you are, doctor!" cried Nanteuil.
+
+"I would you spoke the truth, mademoiselle. Silliness is the capacity
+for happiness. It is the sovereign content. It is the prime asset in a
+civilized society."
+
+"You are paradoxical, my dear doctor," remarked Monsieur de Ligny. "But
+I grant you that it is better to be silly as everybody is silly than to
+be clever as no one else is clever."
+
+"It's true, what Robert says!" exclaimed Nanteuil, sincerely impressed.
+And she added thoughtfully: "At any rate, doctor, one thing is certain.
+It is that stupidity often prevents one from doing stupid things. I have
+noticed that many a time. Whether you take men or women, those are not
+the most stupid who act the most stupidly. For example, there are
+intelligent women who are stupid about men."
+
+"You mean those who cannot do without them."
+
+"There's no hiding anything from you, my little Socrates."
+
+"Ah," sighed the big Doulce, "what a terrible slavery it is! Every woman
+who cannot control her senses is lost to art."
+
+Nanteuil shrugged her pretty shoulders, which still retained something
+of the angularity of youth.
+
+"Oh, my great-grandmother! Don't try to kid the youngsters! What an
+idea! In your days, did actresses control their--how did you put it?
+Fiddlesticks! They didn't control them a scrap!"
+
+Noticing that Nanteuil's temper was rising, the bulky Doulce retired
+with dignity and prudence. Once in the passage, she vouchsafed a further
+word of advice:
+
+"Remember, my darling, to play Angélique as a 'bud.' The part requires
+it."
+
+But Nanteuil, her nerves on edge, took no notice.
+
+"Really," she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, "she makes
+me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have
+forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells
+one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her
+husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he
+tumbled into his cornet. As for her lovers, magnificent men, just ask
+Madame Michon. Why, in less than two years she made mere shadows of
+them, mere puffs of breath. That's the way she controlled them! And
+supposing anyone had told her that she was lost to art!"
+
+Dr. Trublet extended his two hands, palms outward, towards Nanteuil, as
+though to stop her.
+
+"Do not excite yourself, my child. Madame Doulce is sincere. She used
+to love men, now she loves God. One loves what one can, as one can, and
+with what one has. She has become chaste and pious at the fitting age.
+She is diligent in the practices of her religion: she goes to Mass on
+Sundays and feast days, she----"
+
+"Well, she is right to go to Mass," asserted Nanteuil "Michon, light a
+candle for me, to heat my rouge. I must do my lips again. Certainly, she
+is quite right to go to Mass, but religion does not forbid one to have a
+lover."
+
+"You think not?" asked the doctor.
+
+"I know my religion better than you, that's certain!"
+
+A lugubrious bell sounded, and the mournful voice of the call-boy was
+heard in the corridors:
+
+"The curtain-raiser is over!"
+
+Nanteuil rose, and slipped over her wrist a velvet ribbon ornamented
+with a steel medallion. Madame Michon was on her knees arranging the
+three Watteau pleats of the pink dress, and, with her mouth full of
+pins, delivered herself from one corner of her lips of the following
+maxim:
+
+"There is one good thing in being old, men cannot make you suffer any
+more."
+
+Robert de Ligny took a cigarette from his case.
+
+"May I?" And he moved toward the lighted candle on the dressing-table.
+
+Nanteuil, who never took her eyes off him, saw beneath his moustache,
+red and light as flame, his lips, ruddy in the candlelight, drawing in
+and puffing out the smoke. She felt a slight warmth in her ears.
+Pretending to look among her trinkets, she grazed Ligny's neck with her
+lips, and whispered to him:
+
+"Wait for me after the show, in a cab, at the corner of the Rue de
+Tournon."
+
+At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the
+corridor. The actors in the curtain-raiser were returning to their
+dressing-rooms.
+
+"Doctor, pass me your newspaper."
+
+"It is highly uninteresting, mademoiselle."
+
+"Never mind, pass it over."
+
+She took it and held it like a screen above her head.
+
+"The light makes my eyes ache," she observed.
+
+It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a
+headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her
+blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her
+grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart,
+it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and
+she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.
+
+While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall,
+lean young man entered the dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His
+melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow's beak; his
+mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam's apple of his long throat
+made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.
+
+"That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?" gaily inquired Dr.
+Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a
+special liking for Chevalier.
+
+"Come in, everybody!" cried Nanteuil "This isn't a dressing-room; it's a
+mill."
+
+"My respects, none the less, Mme. Miller!" replied Chevalier, "I warn
+you, there's a pack of idiots out in front. Would you believe it--they
+shut me up!"
+
+"That's no reason for walking in without knocking," replied Nanteuil
+snappishly.
+
+The doctor pointed out that Monsieur de Ligny had left the door open;
+whereupon Nanteuil, turning to Ligny, said in a tone of tender reproach:
+
+"Did you really leave the door open? But, when one comes into a room,
+one closes the door on other people: it is one of the first things one
+is taught."
+
+She wrapped herself in a white blanket-cloak.
+
+The call-boy summoned the players to the stage.
+
+She grasped the hand which Ligny offered her, and, exploring his wrist
+with her fingers, dug her nail into the spot, close to the veins, where
+the skin is tender. Then she disappeared into the dark corridor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Chevalier, having resumed his ordinary clothes, sat in a corner box,
+beside Madame Doulce, gazing at Félicie, a small remote figure on the
+stage. And remembering the days when he had held her in his arms, in his
+attic in the Rue des Martyrs, he wept with grief and rage.
+
+They had met last year at a fête given under the patronage of Lecureuil,
+the deputy; a benefit performance given in aid of poor actors of the
+ninth _arrondissement_. He had prowled around her, dumb, famishing, and
+with blazing eyes. For a whole fortnight he had pursued her incessantly.
+Cold and unmoved, she had appeared to ignore him. Then, suddenly, she
+surrendered; so suddenly that when he left her that day, still radiant
+and amazed, he had said a stupid thing. He had told her: "And I took you
+for a little bit of china!" For three whole months he had tasted joys
+acute as pain. Then Félicie had grown elusive, remote, and estranged.
+She loved him no longer. He sought the reason, but could not discover
+it. It tortured him to know that he was no longer loved; jealousy
+tortured him still more. It was true that in the first beautiful hours
+of his love he had known that Félicie had a lover, one Girmandel, a
+court bailiff, who lived in the Rue de Provence, and he had felt it
+deeply. But as he never saw him he had formed so confused and
+ill-defined an idea of him that his jealousy lost itself in uncertainty.
+Félicie assured him that she had never been more than passive in her
+intercourse with Girmandel, that she had not even pretended to care for
+him. He believed her, and this belief gave him the keenest satisfaction.
+She also told him that for a long time past, for months, Girmandel had
+been nothing more than a friend, and he believed her. In short, he was
+deceiving the bailiff, and it was agreeable to him to feel that he
+enjoyed this advantage. He had learned also that Félicie, who was just
+finishing her second year at the Conservatoire, had not denied herself
+to her professor. But the grief which he had felt because of this was
+softened by a time-honoured and venerable custom. Now Robert de Ligny
+was causing him intolerable suffering. For some time past he had found
+him incessantly dangling about her. He could not doubt that she loved
+Robert; and although he sometimes told himself that she had not yet
+given herself to this man, it was not that he believed it, but merely
+that he was fain sometimes to mitigate the bitterness of his
+sufferings.
+
+Mechanical applause broke out at the back of the theatre, and a few
+members of the orchestra, murmuring inaudibly, clapped their hands
+slowly and noiselessly. Nanteuil had just given her last reply to Jeanne
+Perrin.
+
+"_Brava! Brava!_ She is delightful, dear little woman!" sighed Madame
+Doulce.
+
+In his jealous anger, Chevalier was disloyal. Lifting a finger to his
+forehead, he remarked:
+
+"She plays with _that_." Then, placing his hand upon his heart, he
+added: "It is with this that one should act."
+
+"Thanks, dear friend, thanks!" murmured Madame Doulce, who read into
+these maxims an obvious eulogy of herself.
+
+She was, indeed, in the habit of asserting that all good acting comes
+from the heart; she maintained that, to give full expression to a
+passion, it was necessary to experience it, and to feel in one's own
+person the expressions that one wished to represent. She was fond of
+referring to herself as an example of this. When appearing as a tragedy
+queen, after draining a goblet of poison on the stage, her bowels had
+been on fire all night. Nevertheless she was given to saying: "The
+dramatic art is an imitative art, and one imitates an emotion all the
+better for not having experienced it." And to illustrate this maxim she
+drew yet further examples from her triumphant career.
+
+She gave a deep sigh.
+
+"The child is admirably gifted. But she is to be pitied; she has been
+born into a bad period. There is no longer a public nowadays; no
+critics, no plays, no theatres, no artists. It is a decadence of art."
+
+Chevalier shook his head.
+
+"No need to pity her," he said. "She will have all that she can wish;
+she will succeed; she will be wealthy. She is a selfish little jade, and
+a woman who is selfish can get anything she likes. But for people with
+hearts there's nothing left but to hang a stone round one's neck and
+throw oneself into the river. But, I too, I shall go far. I, too, shall
+climb high. I, too, will be a selfish hound."
+
+He got up and went out without waiting for the end of the play. He did
+not return to Félicie's dressing-room for fear of meeting Ligny there,
+the sight of whom was insupportable, and because by avoiding it he could
+pretend to himself that Ligny had not returned thither.
+
+Conscious of physical distress on going away from her, he took five or
+six turns under the dark, deserted arcades of the Odéon, went down the
+steps into the night, and turned up the Rue de Médicis. Coachmen were
+dozing on their boxes, while waiting for the end of the performance, and
+high over the tops of the plane-trees the moon was racing through the
+clouds. Treasuring in his heart an absurd yet soothing remnant of hope,
+he went, this night, as on other nights, to wait for Félicie at her
+mother's flat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Madame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth
+story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened
+upon the garden of the Luxembourg. She gave Chevalier a friendly
+welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved Félicie, and
+because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle
+the fact that he had been her daughter's lover.
+
+She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was
+burning in the stove. In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with
+golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall. They were hung
+about a woman's cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of
+tin-plate; a piece of armour which Félicie had worn last winter, while
+still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc
+at the house of a spiritualistic duchess. An officer's widow and the
+mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean,
+treasured these trophies.
+
+"Félicie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier. I don't expect her before
+midnight. She is on the stage till the end of the play."
+
+"I know; I was in the first piece. I left the theatre after the first
+act of _La Mère confidente_.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur Chevalier, why didn't you stay till the end? My daughter
+would have been so pleased if you had waited. When one is acting one
+likes to have friends in the house."
+
+Chevalier replied ambiguously:
+
+"Oh, as to friends, there are plenty of those about."
+
+"You are mistaken, Monsieur Chevalier; good friends are scarce. Madame
+Doulce was there, of course? Was she pleased with Félicie?" And she
+added, with great humility: "I should indeed be happy if she could
+really make a hit. It is so difficult to come to the fore in her
+profession, for a girl who is alone, without support, without influence!
+And it is so necessary for her to succeed, poor child!"
+
+Chevalier did not feel disposed to lavish any pity upon Félicie. With a
+shrug of the shoulders he replied bluntly:
+
+"No need to worry about that. She'll get on. She is an actress heart and
+soul. She has it in her bones, down to her very legs."
+
+Madame Nanteuil indulged in a quiet smile.
+
+"Poor child! They are not very plump, her legs. Félicie's health is not
+bad, but she must not overdo it. She often has fits of giddiness, and
+sick headaches."
+
+The servant came in to place on the table a dish of fried sausage, a
+bottle of wine, and a few plates.
+
+Meanwhile, Chevalier was searching in his mind for some appropriate
+fashion of asking a question which had been on the tip of his tongue
+ever since he had set foot on the stairs. He wanted to know whether
+Félicie was still meeting Girmandel, whose name he never heard mentioned
+nowadays. We are given to conceiving desires which suit themselves to
+our condition. Now, in the misery of his existence, in the distress of
+his heart, he was full of an eager desire that Félicie, who loved him no
+longer, should love Girmandel, whom she loved but little, and he hoped
+with all his heart that Girmandel would keep her for him, would possess
+her wholly, and leave nothing of her for Robert de Ligny. The idea that
+the girl might be with Girmandel appeased his jealousy, and he dreaded
+to learn that she had broken with him.
+
+Of course he would never have allowed himself to question a mother as to
+her daughter's lovers. But it was permissible to speak of Girmandel to
+Madame Nanteuil, who saw nothing that was other than respectable in the
+relations of her household with the Government official, who was
+well-to-do, married, and the father of two charming daughters. To bring
+Girmandel's name into the conversation he had only to resort to a
+stratagem. Chevalier hit upon one which he thought was ingenious.
+
+"By the way," he remarked, "I saw Girmandel just now in a carriage."
+
+Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
+
+"He was driving down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in a cab. I certainly
+thought I recognized him. I should be greatly surprised if it wasn't
+he."
+
+Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
+
+"His fair beard, his high colour--he's an easy man to recognize,
+Girmandel."
+
+Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
+
+"You were very friendly with him at one time, you and Félicie. Do you
+still see him?"
+
+"Monsieur Girmandel? Oh yes, we still see him," replied Madame Nanteuil
+softly.
+
+These words made Chevalier feel almost happy. But she had deceived him;
+she had not spoken the truth. She had lied out of self-respect, and in
+order not to reveal a domestic secret which she regarded as derogatory
+to the honour of her family. The truth was that, being carried away by
+her passion for Ligny, Félicie had given Girmandel the go-by, and he,
+being a man of the world, had promptly cut off supplies. Madame
+Nanteuil, despite her years, had resumed an old lover, out of her love
+for her child, that she might not want for anything. She had renewed her
+former liaison with Tony Meyer, the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy.
+Tony Meyer was a poor substitute for Girmandel; he was none too free
+with his money. Madame Nanteuil, who was wise and knew the value of
+things, did not complain on that account, and she was rewarded for her
+devotion, for, in the six weeks during which she had been loved anew,
+she had grown young again.
+
+Chevalier, following up his idea, inquired:
+
+"You would hardly say that Girmandel was still a young man, would you?"
+
+"He is not old," said Madame Nanteuil. "A man is not old at forty."
+
+"A bit used up, isn't he?"
+
+"Oh, dear no," replied Madame Nanteuil, quite calmly.
+
+Chevalier became thoughtful and was silent. Madame Nanteuil began to
+nod. Then, being aroused from her somnolence by the servant, who brought
+in the salt-cellar and the water-bottle, she inquired:
+
+"And you, Monsieur Chevalier, is all well with you?"
+
+No, all was not well with him. The critics were out to "down" him. And
+the proof that they had combined against him was that they all said the
+same thing; they said his face lacked expression.
+
+"My face lacking in expression!" he cried indignantly. "They should have
+called it a predestined face. Madame Nanteuil, I aim high, and it is
+that which does me harm. For example, in _La Nuit du 23 octobre_, which
+is being rehearsed now, I am Florentin: I have only six lines; it's a
+washout. But I have increased the importance of the character
+enormously. Durville is furious. He deliberately crabs all my effects."
+
+Madame Nanteuil, placid and kindly, found words to comfort him.
+Obstacles there were, no doubt, but in the end one overcame them. Her
+own daughter had fallen foul of the ill-will of certain critics.
+
+"Half-past twelve!" said Chevalier gloomily. "Félicie is late."
+
+Madame Nanteuil supposed that she had been detained by Madame Doulce.
+
+"Madame Doulce as a rule undertakes to see her home, and you know she
+never hurries herself."
+
+Chevalier rose, as if to take his leave, to show that he remembered his
+manners. Madame Nanteuil begged him to stay.
+
+"Don't go; Félicie won't be long now. She will be pleased to find you
+here. You will have supper with her."
+
+Madame Nanteuil dozed off again in her chair. Chevalier sat gazing in
+silence at the clock hanging on the wall, and as the hand travelled
+across the dial he felt a burning wound in his heart, which grew bigger
+and bigger, and each little stroke of the pendulum touched him to the
+quick, lending a keener eye to his jealousy, by recording the moments
+which Félicie was passing with Ligny. For he was now convinced that they
+were together. The stillness of the night, interrupted only by the
+muffled sound of the cabs bowling along the boulevard, gave reality to
+the thoughts and images which tortured him. He could see them.
+
+Awakened with a start by the sound of singing on the pavement below,
+Madame Nanteuil returned to the thought with which she had fallen
+asleep.
+
+"That's what I am always telling Félicie; one mustn't be discouraged.
+One should not lose heart. We all have our ups and downs in life."
+
+Chevalier nodded acquiescence.
+
+"But those who suffer," he said, "only get what they deserve. It needs
+but a moment to free oneself from all one's troubles. Isn't it so?"
+
+She admitted the fact; certainly there were such things as sudden
+opportunities, especially on the stage.
+
+"Heaven knows," he continued in a deep, brooding voice, "it's not the
+stage I am worrying about. I know I shall make a name for myself one
+day, and a big one. But what's the good of being a great artist if one
+isn't happy? There are stupid worries which are terrible! Pains that
+throb in your temples with strokes as even and as regular as the ticking
+of that clock, till they drive you mad!"
+
+He ceased speaking; the gloomy gaze of his deep-set eyes fell upon the
+trophy hanging on the wall. Then he continued:
+
+"These stupid worries, these ridiculous sufferings, if one endures them
+too long, it simply means that one is a coward."
+
+And he felt the butt of the revolver which he always carried in his
+pocket.
+
+Madame Nanteuil listened to him serenely, with that gentle determination
+not to know anything, which had been her one talent in life.
+
+"Another dreadful thing," she observed, "is to decide what to have to
+eat. Félicie is sick of everything. There's no knowing what to get for
+her."
+
+After that, the flagging conversation languished, drawn out into
+detached phrases, which had no particular meaning. Madame Nanteuil, the
+servant, the coke fire, the lamp, the plate of sausage, awaited Félicie
+in depressing silence. The clock struck one. Chevalier's suffering had
+by this time attained the serenity of a flood tide. He was now certain.
+The cabs were not so frequent and their wheels echoed more loudly along
+the street. The rumbling of one of these cabs suddenly ceased outside the
+house. A few seconds later he heard the slight grating of a key in the
+lock, the slamming of the door, and light footsteps in the outer room.
+
+The clock marked twenty-three minutes past one. He was suddenly full of
+agitation, yet hopeful. She had come! Who could tell what she would say?
+She might offer the most natural explanation of her late arrival.
+
+Félicie entered the room, her hair in disorder, her eyes shining, her
+cheeks white, her bruised lips a vivid red; she was tired, indifferent,
+mute, happy and lovely, seeming to guard beneath her cloak, which she
+held wrapped about her with both hands, some remnant of warmth and
+voluptuous pleasure.
+
+"I was beginning to be worried," said her mother. "Aren't you going to
+unfasten your cloak?"
+
+"I'm hungry," she replied. She dropped into a chair before the little
+round table. Throwing her cloak over the back of the chair, she revealed
+her slender figure in its little black schoolgirl's dress, and, resting
+her left elbow on the oil-cloth table-cover, she proceeded to stick her
+fork into the sliced sausage.
+
+"Did everything go off well to-night?" asked Madame Nanteuil.
+
+"Quite well."
+
+"You see Chevalier has come to keep you company. It is kind of him,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, Chevalier! Well, let him come to the table."
+
+And, without replying further to her mother's questions, she began to
+eat, greedy and charming, like Ceres in the old woman's house. Then she
+pushed aside her plate, and leaning back in her chair, with half-closed
+eyes, and parted lips, she smiled a smile that was akin to a kiss.
+
+Madame Nanteuil, having drunk her glass of mulled wine, rose to her feet.
+
+"You will excuse me, Monsieur Chevalier, I have my accounts to bring up
+to date."
+
+This was the formula which she usually employed to announce that she was
+going to bed.
+
+Left alone with Félicie, Chevalier said to her angrily:
+
+"I know I'm a fool and a groveller; but I'm going mad for love of you.
+Do you hear, Félicie?"
+
+"I should think I do hear. You needn't shout like that!"
+
+"It's ridiculous, isn't it?"
+
+"No, it's not ridiculous, it's----"
+
+She did not complete the sentence.
+
+He drew nearer to her, dragging his chair with him.
+
+"You came in at twenty-five minutes past one. It was Ligny who saw you
+home, I know it. He brought you back in a cab, I heard it stop outside
+the house."
+
+As she did not reply, he continued:
+
+"Deny it, if you can!"
+
+She remained silent, and he repeated, in an urgent, almost appealing
+tone:
+
+"Tell me he didn't!"
+
+Had she been so inclined, she might, with a phrase, with a single word,
+with a tiny movement of head or shoulders, have rendered him perfectly
+submissive, and almost happy. But she maintained a malicious silence.
+With compressed lips and a far-off look in her eyes, she seemed as
+though lost in a dream.
+
+He sighed hoarsely.
+
+"Fool that I was, I didn't think of that! I told myself you would come
+home, as on other nights, with Madame Doulce, or else alone. If I had
+only known that you were going to let that fellow see you home!"
+
+"Well, what would you have done, had you known it?"
+
+"I should have followed you, by God!"
+
+She stared at him with hard, unnaturally bright eyes.
+
+"That I forbid you to do! Understand me! If I learn that you have
+followed me, even once, I'll never see you again. To begin with, you
+haven't the right to follow me. I suppose I am free to do as I like."
+
+Choking with astonishment and anger, he stammered:
+
+"Haven't the right to? Haven't the right to? You tell me I haven't the
+right?"
+
+"No, you haven't the right! Moreover, I won't have it." Her face assumed
+an expression of disgust. "It's a mean trick to spy on a woman, if you
+once try to find out where I'm going, I'll send you about your business,
+and quickly at that."
+
+"Then," he murmured, thunderstruck, "we are nothing to each other, I am
+nothing to you. We have never belonged to each other. But see, Félicie,
+remember----"
+
+But she was losing patience:
+
+"Well, what do you want me to remember?"
+
+"Félicie, remember that you gave yourself to me!"
+
+"My dear boy, you really can't expect me to think of that all day. It
+wouldn't be proper."
+
+He looked at her for a while, more in curiosity than in anger, and said
+to her, half bitterly, half gently:
+
+"They may well call you a selfish little jade! Be one, Félicie, be one,
+as much as you like! What does it matter, since I love you? You are
+mine; I am going to take you back; I am going to take you back, and keep
+you. Think! I can't go on suffering for ever, like a poor dumb beast.
+Listen. I'll start with a clean slate. Let us begin to love one another
+over again. And this time it will be all right. And you'll be mine for
+good, mine only. I am an honest man; you know that. You can depend on
+me. I'll marry you as soon as I've got a position."
+
+She gazed at him with disdainful surprise. He believed that she had
+doubts as to his dramatic future, and, in order to banish them, he said,
+erect on his long legs:
+
+"Don't you believe in my star, Félicie? You are wrong. I can feel that I
+am capable of creating great parts. Let them only give me a part, and
+they'll see. And I have in me not only comedy, but drama, tragedy--yes,
+tragedy. I can deliver verse properly. And that is a talent which is
+becoming rare in these days. So don't imagine, Félicie, that I am
+insulting you when I offer you marriage. Far from it! We will marry
+later on, as soon as it is possible and suitable. Of course, there is
+no need for hurry. Meanwhile, we will resume our pleasant habits of the
+Rue des Martyrs. You remember, Félicie; we were so happy there! The bed
+wasn't wide, but we used to say: "That doesn't matter." I have now two
+fine rooms in the Rue de la Montagne-Saint-Geneviève, behind
+Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. Your portrait hangs on every wall. You will find
+there the little bed of the Rue des Martyrs. Listen to me, I beg of you:
+I have suffered too much; I will not suffer any longer. I demand that
+you shall be mine, mine only."
+
+While he was speaking, Félicie had taken from the mantelpiece the pack
+of cards with which her mother played every night, and was spreading
+them out on the table.
+
+"Mine only. You hear me, Félicie."
+
+"Don't disturb me, I am busy with a game of patience."
+
+"Listen to me, Félicie. I won't have you receiving that fool in your
+dressing-room."
+
+Looking at her cards she murmured:
+
+"All the blacks are at the bottom of the pack."
+
+"I say that fool. He is a diplomatist, and nowadays the Ministry of
+Foreign Affairs is the refuge of incompetents." Raising his voice, he
+continued: "Félicie, for your own sake, as well as for mine, listen to
+me!"
+
+"Well, don't shout, then. Mama is asleep."
+
+He continued in muffled tones:
+
+"Just get it into your head that I don't intend that Ligny shall be your
+lover."
+
+She raised her spiteful little face, and replied:
+
+"And if he is my lover?"
+
+He moved a step closer to her, raising his chair, gazing at her with the
+eye of a madman, and laughing a cracked laugh.
+
+"If he is your lover, he won't be so for long."
+
+And he dropped the chair.
+
+Now she was alarmed. She forced herself to smile.
+
+"You know very well I'm joking!"
+
+She succeeded without much difficulty in making him believe that she had
+spoken thus merely to punish him, because he was getting unbearable. He
+became calmer. She then informed him that she was tired out, that she
+was dropping with sleep. At last he decided to go home. On the landing
+he turned, and said:
+
+"Félicie, I advise you, if you wish to avoid a tragedy, not to see Ligny
+again."
+
+She cried through the half-open door:
+
+"Knock on the window of the porter's lodge, so that he can let you
+out!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+In the dark auditorium large linen sheets protected the balcony and the
+boxes. The orchestra was covered with a huge dust-cloth, which, being
+turned back at the edges, left room for a few human figures,
+indistinctly seen in the gloom: actors, scene-shifters, costumiers,
+friends of the manager, mothers and lovers and actresses. Here and there
+shone a pair of eyes from the black recesses of the boxes.
+
+They were rehearsing, for the fifty-sixth time, _La Nuit du 23 octobre
+1812_, a celebrated drama, dating twenty years back, which had not as
+yet been performed in this theatre. The actors knew their parts, and the
+following day had been chosen for that last private rehearsal which on
+stages less austere than that of the Odéon is known as "the dressmakers'
+rehearsal."
+
+Nanteuil had no part in the play. But she had had business at the
+theatre that day, and, as she had been informed that Marie-Claire was
+execrable in the part of General Malet's wife, she had come to have a
+peep at her, concealed in the depths of a box.
+
+The great scene of the second act was about to begin. The stage setting
+represented an attic in the private asylum where the conspirator was
+confined in 1812. Durville, who filled the part of General Malet, had
+just made his entrance. He was rehearsing in costume: a long blue
+frock-coat, with a collar reaching above his ears, and riding-breeches
+of chamois leather. He had even gone so far as to make up his face for
+the part, the clean-shaven soldierly face of the general of the Empire,
+ornamented with the "hare's-foot" whiskers which were handed down by the
+victors of Austerlitz to their sons, the bourgeois of July. Standing
+erect, his right elbow resting in his left hand, his brow supported by
+his right hand, his deep voice and his tight-fitting breeches expressed
+his pride.
+
+"Alone, and without funds, from the depths of a prison, to attack this
+colossus, who commands a million soldiers, and who causes all the
+peoples and kings of Europe to tremble. Well, this colossus shall fall
+crashing to the ground."
+
+From the back of the stage old Maury, who was playing the conspirator
+Jacquemont, delivered his reply:
+
+"He may crush us in his downfall."
+
+Suddenly cries at once plaintive and angry arose from the orchestra.
+
+The author was exploding. He was a man of seventy, brimming over with
+youth.
+
+"What do I see there at the back of the stage? It's not an actor, it's a
+fire-place. We shall have to send for the bricklayers, the
+marble-workers, to move it. Maury, do get a move on, confound you!"
+
+Maury shifted his position.
+
+"He may crush us in his downfall. I realize that it will not be your
+fault, General. Your proclamation is excellent. You promise them a
+constitution, liberty, equality. It is Machiavellian."
+
+Durville replied:
+
+"And in the best sense. An incorrigible breed, they are making ready to
+violate the oaths that they have not yet taken, and, because they lie,
+they believe themselves Machiavellis. What will you do with absolute
+power, you simpletons?"
+
+The strident voice of the author ground out:
+
+"You are right off the track, Dauville."
+
+"I?" asked the astonished Durville.
+
+"Yes, you, Dauville, you do not understand a word of what you are
+saying."
+
+In order to humiliate them, "to take them down a peg," this man who, in
+the whole course of his life, had never forgotten the name of a
+dairy-woman or a hall-porter, disdained to remember the names of the
+most illustrious actors.
+
+"Dauville, my friend, just do that over again for me."
+
+He could play every part well. Jovial, funereal, violent, tender,
+impetuous, affectionate, he assumed at will a deep or a piping voice; he
+sighed, he roared, he laughed, he wept. He could transform himself, like
+the man in the fairy-tale, into a flame, a river, a woman, a tiger.
+
+In the wings the actors exchanged only short and meaningless phrases.
+Their freedom of speech, their easy morals, the familiarity of their
+manners did not prevent their retaining so much of hypocrisy as is
+needful, in any assemblage of men, if people are to look upon one
+another without feelings of horror and disgust. There even prevailed, in
+this workshop in full activity, a seemly appearance of harmony and
+union, a oneness of feeling created by the thought, lofty or
+commonplace, of the author, a spirit of order which compelled all
+rivalries and all illwill to transform themselves into goodwill and
+harmonious co-operation.
+
+Nanteuil, sitting in her box, felt uneasy at the thought that Chevalier
+was close at hand. For the last two days, since the night on which he
+had uttered his obscure threats, she had not seen him again and the fear
+with which he had inspired her still possessed her. "Félicie, if you
+wish to prevent a tragedy, I advise you not to see Ligny again." What
+did those words portend? She pondered deeply over Chevalier. This young
+fellow, who, only two days earlier, had seemed to her commonplace and
+insignificant, of whom she had seen a good deal too much, whom she knew
+by heart--how mysterious and full of secrets he now appeared to her! How
+suddenly it had dawned upon her that she did not know him! Of what was
+he capable? She tried to guess. What was he going to do? Probably
+nothing. All men who are thrown over by a woman utter threats and do
+nothing. But was Chevalier a man quite like all the rest? People did say
+that he was crazy. That was mere talk. But she herself did not feel sure
+that there might not be a spark of insanity in him. She was studying him
+now with genuine interest. Highly intelligent herself, she had never
+discovered any great signs of intelligence in him; but he had on several
+occasions astonished her by the obstinacy of his will. She could
+remember his performing acts of the fiercest energy. Jealous by nature,
+there were yet certain matters which he understood. He knew what a woman
+is compelled to do in order to win a place on the stage, or to dress
+herself properly; but he could not endure to be deceived for the sake of
+love. Was he the sort of man to commit a crime, to do something
+dreadful? That was what she could not decide. She recalled his mania for
+handling firearms. When she used to visit him in the Rue des Martyrs,
+she always found him in his room, taking an old shot-gun to pieces and
+cleaning it. And yet he never went shooting. He boasted of being a dead
+shot, and carried a revolver on his person. But what did that prove?
+Never before had she thought so much about him.
+
+Nanteuil was tormenting herself in this fashion in her box, when Jenny
+Fagette came to join her there; Jenny Fagette, slender and fragile, the
+incarnation of Alfred de Musset's Muse, who at night wore out her eyes
+of periwinkle-blue by scribbling society notes and fashion articles. A
+mediocre actress, but a clever and wonderfully energetic woman, she was
+Nanteuil's most intimate friend. They recognized in each other
+remarkable qualities, qualities which differed from those which each
+discovered in herself, and they acted in concert as the two great Powers
+of the Odéon. Nevertheless, Fagette was doing her best to take Ligny
+away from her friend; not from inclination, for she was insensible as a
+stick and held men in contempt, but with the idea that a liaison with a
+diplomatist would procure her certain advantages, and above all, in
+order not to miss the opportunity of doing something scandalous.
+Nanteuil was aware of this. She knew that all her sister-actresses,
+Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, were
+trying to take Ligny from her. She had seen Louise Dalle, who dressed
+like a music-mistress, and always had the air of being about to storm an
+omnibus, and retained, even in her provocations and accidental contacts,
+the appearance of incurable respectability, pursue Ligny with her lanky
+legs, and beset him with the glances of a poverty-stricken Pasiphae. She
+had also surprised the oldest actress of the theatre, their excellent
+mother Ravaud, in a corridor, baring, at Ligny's approach, all that was
+left to her, her magnificent arms, which had been famous for forty
+years.
+
+Fagette, with disgust, and the tip of a gloved finger, called Nanteuil's
+attention to the scene through which Durville, old Maury and
+Marie-Claire were struggling.
+
+"Just look at those people. They look as if they were playing at the
+bottom of thirty fathoms of water."
+
+"It's because the top lights are not lit."
+
+"Not a bit of it. This theatre always looks as if it were at the bottom
+of the sea. And to think that I, too, in a moment, have to enter that
+aquarium. Nanteuil, you must not stop longer than one season in this
+theatre. One is drowned in it. But look at them, look at them!"
+
+Durville was becoming almost ventriloqual in order to seem more solemn
+and more virile:
+
+"Peace, the abolition of the combined martial and civil law, and of
+conscription, higher pay for the troops; in the absence of funds, a few
+drafts on the bank, a few commissions suitably distributed, these are
+infallible means."
+
+Madame Doulce entered the box. Unfastening her cloak with its pathetic
+lining of old rabbit-skin, she produced a small dog's-eared book.
+
+"They are Madame de Sévigné's letters," she said. "You know that next
+Sunday I am going to give a reading of the best of Madame de Sévigné's
+letters."
+
+"Where?" asked Fagette.
+
+"Salle Renard."
+
+It must have been some remote and little known hall, for Nanteuil and
+Fagette had not heard of it.
+
+"I am giving this reading for the benefit of the three poor orphans left
+by Lacour, the actor, who died so sadly of consumption this winter. I am
+counting on you, my darlings, to dispose of some tickets for me."
+
+"All the same, she really is ridiculous, Marie-Claire!" said Nanteuil.
+
+Some one scratched at the door of the box. It was Constantin Marc, the
+youthful author of a play, _La Grille_, which the Odéon was going to
+rehearse immediately; and Constantin Marc, although a countryman living
+in the forest, could henceforth breathe only in the theatre. Nanteuil
+was to take the principal part in the play. He gazed upon her with
+emotion, as the precious amphora destined to be the receptacle of his
+thought.
+
+Meanwhile Durville continued hoarsely:
+
+"If our France can be saved only at the price of our life and honour, I
+shall say, with the man of '93: 'Perish our memory!'"
+
+Fagette pointed her finger at a bloated youth, who was sitting in the
+orchestra, resting his chin on his walking-stick.
+
+"Isn't that Baron Deutz?"
+
+"Need you ask!" replied Nanteuil. "Ellen Midi is in the cast. She plays
+in the fourth act. Baron Deutz has come to display himself."
+
+"Just wait a minute, my children; I have a word to say to that
+ill-mannered cub. He met me yesterday in the Place de la Concorde, and
+he didn't bow to me."
+
+"What, Baron Deutz? He couldn't have seen you!"
+
+"He saw me perfectly well. But he was with his people. I am going to
+have him on toast. Just you watch, my dears."
+
+She called him very softly:
+
+"Deutz! Deutz!"
+
+The Baron came towards her, smiling and well-pleased with himself, and
+leaned his elbows on the edge of the box.
+
+"Tell me, Monsieur Deutz, when you met me yesterday, were you in very
+bad company that you did not raise your hat to me?"
+
+He looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"I? I was with my sister."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+On the stage, Marie-Claire, hanging upon Durville's neck, was
+exclaiming:
+
+"Go! Victorious or defeated, in good or evil fortune, your glory will be
+equally great. Come what may, I shall know how to show myself the wife
+of a hero."
+
+"That will do, Madame Marie-Claire!" said Pradel.
+
+Just at that moment Chevalier made his entry, and immediately the
+author, tearing his hair, let loose a flood of imprecations:
+
+"Do you call that an entry? It's a tumble, a catastrophe, a cataclysm!
+Ye gods! A meteor, an aerolith, a bit of the moon falling on to the
+stage would be less horribly disastrous! I will take off my play!
+Chevalier, come in again, my good fellow!"
+
+The artist who had designed the costumes, Michel, a fair young man with
+a mystic's beard, was seated in the first row, on the arm of a stall. He
+leaned over and whispered into the ear of Roger, the scene-painter:
+
+"And to think it's the fifty-sixth time that he's dropped on Chevalier
+with the same fury!"
+
+"Well, you know, Chevalier is rottenly bad," replied Roger, without
+hesitation.
+
+"It isn't that he is bad," returned Michel indulgently. "But he always
+seems to be laughing, and nothing could be worse for a comedy actor. I
+knew him when he was quite a kid, at Montmartre. At school his masters
+used to ask him: 'Why are you laughing?' He was not laughing; he had no
+desire to laugh; he used to get his ears boxed from morning to night.
+His parents wanted to put him in a chemical factory. But he had dreams
+of the stage, and spent his days on the Butte Montmartre, in the studio
+of the painter Montalent. Montalent at that time was working day and
+night on his _Death of Saint Louis_, a huge picture which was
+commissioned for the cathedral of Carthage. One day, Montalent said to
+him----"
+
+"A little less noise!" shouted Pradel.
+
+"Said to him: 'Chevalier, since you have nothing to do, just sit for
+Philippe the Bold.' 'With pleasure,' said Chevalier. Montalent told him
+to assume the attitude of a man bowed down with grief. More, he stuck
+two tears as big as spectacle lenses on his cheeks. He finished his
+picture, forwarded it to Carthage, and had half a dozen bottles of
+champagne sent up. Three months later he received from Father Cornemuse,
+the head of the French Missions in Tunis, a letter informing him that
+his painting of the _Death of Saint Louis_, having been submitted to the
+Cardinal-Archbishop, had been refused by His Eminence, because of the
+unseemly expression on the face of Philippe the Bold who was laughing as
+he watched the saintly King, his father, dying on a bed of straw.
+Montalent could not make head or tail of it; he was furious, and wanted
+to take proceedings against the Cardinal-Archbishop. His painting was
+returned to him; he unpacked it, gazed at it in gloomy silence, and
+suddenly shouted: 'It's true--Philippe the Bold appears to be splitting
+his sides with laughter. What a fool I have been! I gave him the head of
+Chevalier, who always seems to be laughing, the brute!'"
+
+"Will you be quiet there!" yelled Pradel.
+
+And the author exclaimed:
+
+"Pradel, my dear boy, just pitch all those people into the street."
+
+Indefatigable, he was arranging the scene:
+
+"A little farther, Trouville, there. Chevalier, you walk up to the
+table, you pick up the documents one by one, and you say:
+'Senatus-Consultum. Order of the day. Despatches to the departments.
+Proclamation,' Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, Master. 'Senatus-Consultum. Order of the day. Despatches to the
+departments. Proclamation.'"
+
+"Now, Marie-Claire, my child, a little more life, confound it! Cross
+over! That's it! Very good. Back again! Good! Very good! Buck up! Ah,
+the wretched woman! She's spoiling it all!"
+
+He called the stage manager.
+
+"Romilly, give us a little more light, one can't see an inch. Dauville,
+my dear friend, what are you doing there in front of the prompter's box!
+You seem glued to it! Just get into your head, once for all, that you
+are not the statue of General Malet, that you are General Malet in
+person, that my play is not a catalogue of wax-work figures, but a
+living moving tragedy, one which brings the tears into your eyes, and----"
+
+Words failed him, and he sobbed for a long while into his handkerchief.
+Then he roared:
+
+"Holy thunder! Pradel! Romilly! Where is Romilly? Ah, there he is, the
+villain! Romilly, I told you to put the stove nearer the dormer-window.
+You have not done so. What are you thinking of, my friend?"
+
+The rehearsal was suddenly brought to a standstill by a serious
+difficulty. Chevalier, the bearer of documents on which hung the fate of
+the Empire, was to escape from his prison by the dormer-window. The
+stage "business" had not yet been settled; it had been impossible to do
+so before the setting of the stage was completed. It was now discovered
+that the measurements had been wrongly taken, and the dormer-window was
+not accessible.
+
+The author leapt on to the stage.
+
+"Romilly, my friend, the stove is not in the place fixed on. How can you
+expect Chevalier to get out through the dormer-window? Push the stove to
+the right at once."
+
+"I'm willing enough," said Romilly, "but we shall be blocking up the
+door."
+
+"What's that? We shall be blocking up the door?"
+
+"Precisely."
+
+The manager of the theatre, the stage-manager, the scene-shifters stood
+examining the stage-setting with gloomy attention, while the author held
+his peace.
+
+"Don't worry, Master," said Chevalier. "There's no need to change
+anything. I shall be able to jump out all right."
+
+Climbing on to the stove, he did indeed succeed in grasping the sill of
+the window, and in hoisting himself up until his elbows rested on it, a
+feat that had seemed impossible.
+
+A murmur of admiration rose from the stage, the wings, and the house.
+Chevalier had produced an astonishing impression by his strength and
+agility.
+
+"Splendid!" exclaimed the author. "Chevalier, my friend, that is
+perfect. The fellow is as nimble as a monkey. I'll be hanged if any of
+you could do as much. If all the parts were in such good hands as that
+of Florentin, the play would be lauded to the skies."
+
+Nanteuil, in her box, almost admired him. For one brief second he had
+seemed to her more than man, both man and gorilla, and the fear with
+which he had inspired her was immeasurably increased. She did not love
+him; she had never loved him; she did not desire him; it was a long time
+since she had really wanted him; and, for some days past, she had been
+unable to imagine herself taking pleasure in any other than Ligny; but
+had she at that moment found herself alone with Chevalier she would have
+felt powerless, and she would have sought to appease him by her
+submission as one appeases a supernatural power.
+
+On the stage, while an Empire _salon_ was being lowered from the flies,
+through all the noise of the running gear and the grounding of the
+supports, the author held the whole of the company, as well as all the
+supers, in the hollow of his hand, and at the same time gave them all
+advice, or illustrated what he wanted of them.
+
+"You, the big woman, the cake-seller, Madame Ravaud, haven't you ever
+heard the women calling in the Champs-Élysées: 'Eat your fill, ladies!
+This way for a treat!' It is _sung_. Just learn the tune by to-morrow.
+And you, drummer-boy, just give me your drum; I'm going to teach you how
+to beat the roll, confound it! Fagette, my child, what the mischief are
+you doing at a ball given by the Minister of Police, if you haven't any
+stockings with golden clocks? Take off those knitted woollen stockings
+immediately. This is the very last play that I shall produce in this
+theatre. Where is the colonel of the 10th cohort? So it's you? Well
+then, my friend, your soldiers march past like so many pigs. Madame
+Marie-Claire, come forward a little, so that I may teach you how to
+curtsy."
+
+He had a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and arms and legs everywhere.
+
+In the house, Romilly was shaking hands with Monsieur Gombaut, of the
+Academy of Moral Sciences, who had dropped in as a neighbour.
+
+"You may say what you will, Monsieur Gombaut, it is perhaps not accurate
+as far as facts are concerned, but it's drama."
+
+"Malet's conspiracy," replied Monsieur Gombaut, "remains, and will
+doubtless remain for a long time to come, an historical enigma. The
+author of this drama has taken advantage of those points which are
+obscure in order to introduce dramatic elements. But what, to my
+thinking, is beyond a doubt, is that General Malet, although associated
+with Royalists, was himself a Republican, and was working for the
+re-establishment of popular Government. In the course of his examination
+during the trial, he pronounced a sublime and profound utterance. When
+the presiding judge of the court-martial asked him: 'Who were your
+accomplices?' Malet replied: 'All France, and you yourself, had I
+succeeded.'"
+
+Leaning on the edge of Nanteuil's box, an aged sculptor, as venerable
+and as handsome as an ancient satyr, was gazing with glistening eye and
+smiling lips at the stage, which at that moment was in a state of
+commotion and confusion.
+
+"Are you pleased with the play, Master?" Nanteuil asked him.
+
+And the Master, who had no eyes for anything but bones, tendons and
+muscles, replied:
+
+"Yes, indeed, mademoiselle; yes, indeed! I see over there a little
+creature, little Midi, whose shoulder attachment is a jewel."
+
+He outlined it with his thumb. Tears welled up into his eyes.
+
+Chevalier asked if he might enter the box. He was happy, less on account
+of his prodigious success than at seeing Félicie. He dreamed, in his
+infatuation, that she had come for his sake, that she loved him, that
+she was returning to him.
+
+She feared him, and, as she was timid, she flattered him.
+
+"I congratulate you, Chevalier. You were simply astounding. Your exit is
+a marvel. You can take my word for it. I am not the only one to say so.
+Fagette thought you were wonderful."
+
+"Really?" asked Chevalier.
+
+It was one of the happiest moments of his life.
+
+A shrieking voice issued from the deserted heights of the third
+galleries, sounding through the house like the whistle of a locomotive.
+
+"One can't hear a word you say, my children; speak louder and pronounce
+your words distinctly!"
+
+The author appeared, infinitely small, in the shadow of the dome.
+
+Thereupon the utterance of the players who were collected at the front
+of the stage, around a naphtha flare, rose more distinctly:
+
+"The Emperor will allow the troops to rest for some weeks at Moscow;
+then with the rapidity of an eagle he will swoop down upon St.
+Petersburg."
+
+"Spades, clubs, trump, two points to me."
+
+"There we shall spend the winter, and next spring we shall penetrate
+into India, crossing Persia, and the British power will be a thing of
+the past."
+
+"Thirty-six in diamonds."
+
+"And I the four aces."
+
+"By the way, gentlemen, what say you to the Imperial decree concerning
+the actors of Paris, dated from the Kremlin? There's an end of the
+squabbles between Mademoiselle Mars and Mademoiselle Leverd."
+
+"Do look at Fagette," said Nanteuil. "She is charming in that blue
+Marie-Louise dress trimmed with chinchilla."
+
+Madame Doulce brought out from under her furs a stack of tickets already
+soiled through having been too frequently offered.
+
+"Master," she said, addressing Constantin Marc, "you know that next
+Sunday I am to give a reading, with appropriate remarks, of the best
+letters of Madame de Sévigné, for the benefit of the three poor orphans
+left by Lacour, the actors who died this winter in so deplorable a
+fashion."
+
+"Had he any talent?" asked Constantin Marc.
+
+"None whatever," said Nanteuil.
+
+"Well, then, in what way is his death deplorable?"
+
+"Oh, Master," sighed Madame Doulce, "do not pretend to be unfeeling."
+
+"I am not pretending to be unfeeling. But here is something that
+surprises me: the value which we set upon the lives of those who are not
+of the slightest interest to us. We seem as though we believe that life
+is in itself something precious. Yet nature teaches us plainly enough
+that nothing is more worthless and contemptible. In former days people
+were less besmeared with sentimentalism. Each of us held his own life to
+be infinitely precious, but he did not profess any respect whatever for
+the life of others. We were nearer to nature in those days. We were
+created to devour one another. But our debilitated, enervated,
+hypocritical race wallows in a sly cannibalism. While we are gulping one
+another down we declare that life is sacred, and we no longer dare to
+confess that life is murder."
+
+"That life is murder," echoed Chevalier dreamily, without grasping the
+meaning of the words.
+
+Then he poured forth a string of nebulous ideas:
+
+"Murder and bloodshed, that may be! But amusing bloodshed, and comical
+murder. Life is a burlesque catastrophe, a terrible comedy, the mask of
+carnival over blood-stained cheeks. That is what life means to the
+artist; the artist on the stage, and the artist in action."
+
+Nanteuil uneasily sought a meaning in these confused phrases.
+
+The actor continued excitedly:
+
+"Life is yet another thing: it is the flower and the knife, it is to see
+red one day and blue the next, it is hatred and love, ravishing,
+delightful hatred, cruel love."
+
+"Monsieur Chevalier," asked Constantin Marc in the quietest of tones,
+"does it not seem to you natural to be a murderer, and do you not think
+that it is merely the fear of being killed that prevents us from
+killing?"
+
+Chevalier replied in deep, pensive tones:
+
+"Most certainly not! It would not be the fear of being killed that would
+prevent me from killing. I have no fear of death. But I feel a respect
+for the life of others. I am humane in spite of myself. I have for some
+time past been seriously considering the question which you have just
+asked me, Monsieur Constantin Marc. I have pondered over it day and
+night, and I know now that I could not kill any one.'"
+
+At this, Nanteuil, filled with joy, cast upon him a look of contempt.
+She feared him no longer, and she could not forgive him for having
+alarmed her.
+
+She rose.
+
+"Good evening; I have a headache. Good-bye till to-morrow, Monsieur
+Constantin Marc." And she went out briskly.
+
+Chevalier ran after her down the corridor, descended the stage staircase
+behind her, and rejoined her by the stage doorkeeper's box.
+
+"Félicie, come and dine with me to-night at our cabaret. I should be so
+glad if you would! Will you?"
+
+"Good gracious, no!"
+
+"Why won't you?"
+
+"Leave me alone; you are bothering me!"
+
+She tried to escape. He detained her.
+
+"I love you so! Don't be too cruel to me!"
+
+Taking a step towards him, her lips curling back from her clenched
+teeth, she hissed into his ear:
+
+"It's all over, over, over! You hear me? I am fed up with you."
+
+Then, very gently and solemnly, he said:
+
+"It is the last time that we two shall speak together. Listen, Félicie,
+before there is a tragedy I ought to warn you. I cannot compel you to
+love me. But I do not intend that you shall love another. For the last
+time I advise you not to see Monsieur de Ligny again, I shall prevent
+your belonging to him."
+
+"You will prevent me? You? My poor dear fellow!"
+
+In a still more gentle tone he replied:
+
+"I mean it; I shall do it. A man can get what he wants; only he must pay
+the price."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Returning home, Félicie succumbed to a fit of tears. She saw Chevalier
+once more imploring her in a despairing voice with the look of a poor
+man. She had heard that voice and seen that expression when passing
+tramps, worn out with fatigue, on the high road, when her mother fearing
+that her lungs were affected, had taken her to spend the winter at
+Antibes with a wealthy aunt. She despised Chevalier for his gentleness
+and tranquil manner. But the recollection of that face and that voice
+disturbed her. She could not eat, she felt as if she were suffocating.
+In the evening she was attacked by such an excruciating internal pain
+that she thought she must be dying. She thought this feeling of
+prostration was due to the fact that it was two days since she had seen
+Robert. It was only nine o'clock. She hoped that she might find him
+still at home, and put on her hat.
+
+"Mamma, I have to go to the theatre this evening. I am off."
+
+Out of consideration for her mother, she was in the habit of making such
+veiled explanations.
+
+"Go, my child, but don't come home too late."
+
+Ligny lived with his parents. He had, on the top floor of the charming
+house in the Rue Vernet, a small bachelor flat, lit by round windows,
+which he called his "oeil-de-boeuf." Félicie sent word by the
+hall-porter that a lady was waiting for him in a carriage. Ligny did not
+care for women to look him up too often in the bosom of his family. His
+father, who was in the diplomatic service, and deeply engrossed in the
+foreign interests of the country, remained in an incredible state of
+ignorance as to what went on in his own house. But Madame de Ligny was
+determined that the decencies of life should be observed in her home,
+and her son was careful to satisfy her requirements in the matter of
+outward appearances, since they never probed to the bottom of things.
+She left him perfectly free to love where he would, and only rarely, in
+serious and expansive moments, did she hint that it was to the advantage
+of young men to cultivate the acquaintance of women of their own class.
+Hence it was that Robert had always dissuaded Félicie from coming to him
+in the Rue Vernet. He had rented, in the Boulevard de Villiers, a small
+house, where they could meet in absolute freedom. But on the present
+occasion, after two days without seeing her, he was greatly pleased by
+her unexpected visit, and he came down immediately.
+
+Leaning back in the cab, they drove through the darkness and the snow,
+at the quiet pace of their aged hack, through the streets and
+boulevards, while the darkness of the night cloaked their love-making.
+
+At her door, having seen her home, he said:
+
+"Good-bye till to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow, Boulevard de Villiers. Come early."
+
+She was leaning on him preparatory to stepping down from the cab.
+Suddenly she started back.
+
+"There! There! Among the trees. He has seen us. He was watching us."
+
+"Who, then?"
+
+"A man--some one I don't know."
+
+She had just recognized Chevalier. She stepped out, rang the bell, and,
+nestling in Robert's fur coat, waited, trembling, for the door to open.
+When it was opened, she detained him.
+
+"Robert, see me upstairs, I am frightened."
+
+Not without some impatience, he followed her up the stairs.
+
+Chevalier had waited for Félicie, in the little dining-room, before the
+armour which she had worn as Jeanne d'Arc, together with Madame
+Nanteuil, until one o'clock in the morning. He had left at that hour,
+and had watched for her on the pavement, and on seeing the cab stop in
+front of the door he had concealed himself behind a tree. He knew very
+well that she would return with Ligny; but when he saw them together it
+was as if the earth had yawned beneath him, and, so that he should not
+fall to the ground, he had clutched the trunk of the tree. He remained
+until Ligny had emerged from the house; he watched him as, wrapped in
+his fur coat, he got into the cab, took a couple of steps as if to
+spring on him, stopped short, and then with long strides went down the
+boulevard.
+
+He went his way, driven by the rain and wind. Feeling too hot, he doffed
+his felt hat, and derived a certain pleasure from the sense of the icy
+drops of water on his forehead. He was vaguely conscious that houses,
+trees, walls, and lights went past him indefinitely; he wandered on,
+dreaming.
+
+He found himself, without knowing how he had got there, on a bridge
+which he hardly knew. Half-way across it stood the colossal statue of a
+woman. His mind was now at rest; he had formed a resolution. It was an
+old idea, which he had now driven into his brain like a nail, which
+pierced it through and through. He no longer examined it. He calculated
+coldly the means of carrying out the thing he had determined to do. He
+walked straight ahead at random, absorbed in thought, and as calm as a
+mathematician.
+
+On the Pont des Arts he became aware that a dog was following him. He
+was a big, long-haired farm dog, with eyes of different colours, which
+were full of gentleness, and an expression of infinite distress.
+Chevalier spoke to him:
+
+"You've no collar. You are not happy. Poor fellow, I can't do anything
+for you."
+
+By four o'clock in the morning he found himself in the Avenue de
+l'Observatoire. On seeing the houses of the Boulevard Saint-Michel he
+experienced a painful impression and abruptly turned back toward the
+Observatory. The dog had vanished. Near the monument of the Lion of
+Belfort, Chevalier stopped in front of a deep trench which cut the road
+in two. Against the bank of excavated earth, under a tarpaulin supported
+by four stakes, an old man was keeping vigil before a brazier. The
+lappets of his rabbit-skin cap were down over his ears; his huge nose
+was a flaming red. He raised his head; his eyes, which were watering,
+seemed wholly white, without pupils, each set in a ring of fire and
+tears. He was stuffing into the bowl of his cutty a few scraps of
+canteen tobacco, mixed with bread-crumbs, which did not fill half the
+bowl of his little pipe.
+
+"Will you have some tobacco, old fellow?" asked Chevalier, offering him
+his pouch.
+
+The man's answer was slow in coming. His understanding was not quick,
+and courtesies astonished him. Finally, he opened a mouth which was
+quite black, and said:
+
+"I won't say no to that."
+
+He half rose from his seat. One of his feet was shod in an old slipper;
+the other was swathed in rags. Slowly, with hands numb with the cold, he
+stuffed his pipe. It was snowing, a snow that melted as it fell.
+
+"You will excuse me?" said Chevalier, and he slipped under the tarpaulin
+and seated himself beside the old man.
+
+From time to time they exchanged a remark.
+
+"Rotten weather!"
+
+"It's what we expect at this season. Winter's hard; summer's better."
+
+"So you look after the job at night, old fellow?"
+
+The old man answered readily when questioned. Before he spoke his throat
+emitted a long, very gentle murmur.
+
+"I do one thing one day; another thing another. Odd jobs. See?"
+
+"You are not a Parisian?"
+
+"No, I was born in La Creuse. I used to work as a navvy in the Vosges.
+I left there the year the Prussians and other foreigners came. There
+were thousands of them. Can't understand where they all came from. Maybe
+you've heard of the war of the Prussians, young man?"
+
+He remained silent for a long spell and then resumed:
+
+"So you are out on a spree, my lad. You don't feel like going back to
+the works yet?"
+
+"I am an actor," replied Chevalier.
+
+The old man who did not understand, inquired:
+
+"Where is it, your works?"
+
+Chevalier was anxious to rouse the old man's admiration.
+
+"I play comedy parts in a big theatre," he said. "I am one of the
+principal actors at the Odéon. You know the Odéon?"
+
+The watchman shook his head. No, he did not know the Odéon. After a
+prolonged silence, he once more opened the black cavern of his mouth:
+
+"And so, young man, you are on the loose. You don't want to go back to
+the works, eh?"
+
+Chevalier replied:
+
+"Read the paper the day after to-morrow, you will see my name in it."
+
+The old man tried to discover a meaning in these words, but it was too
+difficult; he gave it up, and reverted to his familiar train of thought.
+
+"When once one's off on the loose, it is sometimes for weeks and
+months."
+
+At daybreak, Chevalier resumed his wanderings. The sky was milky. Heavy
+wheels were breaking the silence of the paved roads. Voices, here and
+there, rang through the keen air. The snow was no longer falling. He
+walked on at haphazard. The spectacle of the city's reviving life made
+him feel almost cheerful. On the Pont des Arts he stood for a long time
+watching the Seine flow by, after which he continued on his way. On the
+Place du Havre he saw an open café. A faint streak of dawn was reddening
+the front windows. The waiters were sanding the brick pavement and
+setting out the tables. He flung himself into a chair.
+
+"Waiter, an absinthe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+In the cab, beyond the fortifications, which were skirted by the
+deserted boulevard, Félicie and Robert held one another in a close
+embrace.
+
+"Don't you love your own Félicie? Tell me! Doesn't it flatter your
+vanity to possess a little woman who makes people cheer and clap her,
+who is written about in the newspapers? Mamma pastes all my notices in
+her album. The album is full already."
+
+He replied that he had not waited for her to succeed before discovering
+how charming she was; and, in fact, their liaison had begun when she was
+making an obscure first appearance at the Odéon in a revival which had
+fallen flat.
+
+"When you told me that you wanted me, I didn't keep you waiting, did I?
+We didn't take long about that! Wasn't I right? You are too sensible to
+think badly of me because I didn't keep things dragging along. When I
+saw you for the first time I felt that I was to be yours, so it wasn't
+worth while delaying. I don't regret it. Do you?"
+
+The cab stopped at a short distance from the fortifications, in front
+of a garden railing.
+
+This railing, which had not been painted for a long time, stood on a
+wall faced with pebbles, low and broad enough to permit of children
+perching themselves on it. It was screened half-way up by a sheet of
+iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than
+ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry
+surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the
+middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside,
+with worm-eaten slatted shutters.
+
+They alighted from the cab. The trees of the boulevard, in four straight
+lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the
+wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to
+the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.
+
+"How dismal the country is!" she said, with a shiver.
+
+"But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country."
+
+He could not open the gate, and the lock creaked. Irritated by the
+sound, she said:
+
+"Open it, do: the noise is getting on my nerves."
+
+She noticed that the cab which had come from Paris had stopped near
+their house, at about the tenth tree from where she stood; she looked at
+the thin, steaming horse and the shabby driver, and asked:
+
+"What is that carriage?"
+
+"It's a cab, my pet."
+
+"Why does it stop here?"
+
+"It has not stopped here? It's stopping in front of the next house."
+
+"There is no next house; there's only a vacant lot."
+
+"Well, then, it has stopped in front of a vacant lot. What more can I
+tell you?"
+
+"I don't see anyone getting out of it."
+
+"The driver is perhaps waiting for a fare."
+
+"What, in front of a vacant lot!"
+
+"Probably, my dear. This lock has got rusty."
+
+She crept along, hiding herself behind the trees, toward the spot where
+the cab had stopped, and then returned to Ligny, who had succeeded in
+unlocking the gate.
+
+"Robert, the blinds of the cab are down."
+
+"Well, then, there's a loving couple inside."
+
+"Don't you think there's something queer about that cab?"
+
+"It is not a thing of beauty, but all cabs are ugly. Come in."
+
+"Isn't somebody following us?"
+
+"Whom do you expect to follow us?"
+
+"I don't know. One of your women friends."
+
+But she was not saying what was in her thoughts.
+
+"Do come in, my darling."
+
+When she had entered the garden she said:
+
+"Be sure to close the gate properly, Robert."
+
+Before them stretched a small oval grass-plot.
+
+Behind it stood the house, with its flight of three steps, sheltered by
+a zinc portico, its six windows, and its slate roof.
+
+Ligny had rented it for a year from an old merchant's clerk, who had
+wearied of it because nocturnal prowlers used to steal his fowls and
+rabbits. On either side of the grass-plot a gravel path led to the
+steps. They took the path on the right. The gravel creaked beneath their
+feet.
+
+"Madame Simonneau has forgotten to close the shutters again," said
+Ligny.
+
+Madame Simonneau was a woman from Neuilly, who came every morning to
+clean up.
+
+A large Judas-tree, leaning to one side, and to all appearance dead,
+stretched one of its round black branches as far as the portico.
+
+"I don't quite like that tree," said Félicie; "its branches are like
+great snakes. One of them goes almost into our room."
+
+They went up the three front steps; and, while he was looking through
+his bunch of keys for the key of the front door, she rested her head on
+his shoulder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Félicie, when unveiling her beauty, displayed a serene pride which made
+her adorable. She revealed such a quiet satisfaction in her nudity that
+her chemise, when it fell to her feet, made the onlooker think of a
+white peacock.
+
+And when Robert saw her in her nakedness, bright as the streams or
+stars, he said:
+
+"At least you don't make one badger you! Its curious: there are women,
+who, even if you don't ask them for anything, surrender themselves
+completely, go just as far as it's possible to go, yet all the time they
+won't let you see so much as a finger-breadth of skin."
+
+"Why?" asked Félicie, playing with the airy threads of her hair.
+
+Robert de Ligny had experience of women. Yet he did not realize what an
+insidious question this was. He had received some training in moral
+science, and in replying he derived inspiration from the professors
+whose classes he had attended.
+
+"It is doubtless a matter of training, religious principles, and an
+innate feeling which survives even when----"
+
+This was not at all what he ought to have replied, for Félicie,
+shrugging her shoulders, and placing her hands upon her smoothly
+polished hips, interrupted him sharply:
+
+"Well, you are simple! It's because they've got bad figures! Training!
+Religion! It makes me boil to hear such rubbish! Have I been brought up
+any worse than other women? Have I less religion than they have? Tell
+me, Robert, how many really well-made women have you ever seen? Just
+reckon them up on your fingers. Yes, there are heaps of women who won't
+show their shoulders or anything. Take Fagette; she won't let even women
+see her undress; when she puts a clean chemise on she holds the old one
+between her teeth. Sure enough, I should do the same if I were built as
+she is!"
+
+She relapsed into silence, and, with quiet arrogance, slowly ran the
+palms of her hands over her sides and her loins, observing proudly:
+
+"And the best of it is that there's not too much of me anywhere."
+
+She was conscious of the charm imparted to her beauty by the graceful
+slenderness of her outlines.
+
+Now her head, thrown back on the pillow, was bathed in the masses of her
+golden tresses, which lay streaming in all directions; her slender body,
+slightly raised by a pillow slipped beneath her loins, lay motionless at
+full length; one gleaming leg was extended along the edge of the bed,
+ending in a sharply chiselled foot like the point of a sword. The light
+from the great fire which had been lit in the fireplace gilded her
+flesh, casting palpitating lights and shadows over her motionless body,
+clothing it in mystery and splendour, while her outer clothing and her
+underlinen, lying on the chairs and the carpet, waited, like a docile
+flock.
+
+She raised herself on her elbow, resting her cheek in her hand.
+
+"You are the first, really you are, I am not lying: the others don't
+exist."
+
+He felt no jealousy in respect of the past; he had no fear of
+comparisons. He questioned her:
+
+"Then the others?"
+
+"To begin with, there were only two: my professor, and he of course
+doesn't count, and there was the man I told you about, a solid sort of a
+person, whom my mother saddled me with."
+
+"No more?"
+
+"I swear it."
+
+"And Chevalier?"
+
+"Chevalier? He? Good gracious, no! You wouldn't have had me look at
+him!"
+
+"And the solid sort of person found by your mother, he, too, does not
+count any more?"
+
+"I assure you that, with you, I am another woman. It's the solemn truth
+that you are the first to possess me. It's queer, all the same.
+Directly I set eyes on you I wanted you. Quite suddenly I felt I must
+have you. I felt it somehow. What? I should find it very hard to say.
+Oh, I didn't stop to think. With your conventional, stiff, frigid
+manners, and your appearance, like a curly-haired little wolf, you
+pleased me, that was all! And now I could not do without you. No,
+indeed, I couldn't."
+
+He assured her that on her surrender he had been deliciously surprised;
+he said all sorts of pretty, caressing things, all of which had been
+said before.
+
+Taking his head in her hands, she said:
+
+"You have really the teeth of a wolf. I think it was your teeth that
+made me want you the first day. Bite me!"
+
+He pressed her to his bosom, and felt her firm supple body respond to
+his embrace. Suddenly she released herself:
+
+"Don't you hear the gravel creaking?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Listen: I can hear a sound of footsteps on the path."
+
+Sitting upright, her body bent forward, she strained her ears.
+
+He was disappointed, excited, irritated, and perhaps his self-esteem was
+slightly hurt.
+
+"What has come over you? It's absurd."
+
+She cried very sharply:
+
+"Do hold your tongue!"
+
+She was listening intently to a slight sound, near at hand, as of
+breaking branches.
+
+Suddenly she leapt from the bed with such instinctive agility, with a
+movement so like the rapid spring of a young animal, that Ligny,
+although by no means of a literary turn of mind, thought of the cat
+metamorphosed into a woman.
+
+"Are you crazy? Where are you going?"
+
+Raising a corner of the curtain, she wiped the moisture from the corner
+of a pane, and peered out through the window. She saw nothing but the
+night. The noise had ceased altogether.
+
+During this time, Ligny, lying moodily against the wall, was grumbling:
+
+"As you will, but, if you catch a cold, so much the worse for you!"
+
+She glided back into bed. At first he remained somewhat resentful; but
+she wrapped him about with the delicious freshness of her body.
+
+When they came to themselves they were surprised to see by one of their
+watches that it was seven o'clock.
+
+Ligny lit the lamp, a paraffin lamp, supported on a column, with a
+cut-glass container inside which the wick was curled up like a
+tape-worm. Félicie was very quick in dressing herself. They had to
+descend one floor by a wooden staircase, dark and narrow. He went ahead,
+carrying the lamp, and halted in the passage.
+
+"You go out, darling, before I put the lamp out."
+
+She opened the door, and immediately recoiled with a loud shriek. She
+had seen Chevalier standing on the outer steps, with arms extended,
+tall, black, erect as a crucifix. His hand grasped a revolver. The glint
+of the weapon was not perceptible; nevertheless she saw it quite
+distinctly.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Ligny, who was turning down the wick of
+the lamp.
+
+"Listen, but don't come near me!" cried Chevalier in a loud voice. "I
+forbid you to belong to one another. This is my dying wish. Good-bye,
+Félicie."
+
+And he slipped the barrel of the revolver into his mouth.
+
+Crouching against the passage wall, she closed her eyes. When she
+reopened them, Chevalier was lying on his side, across the doorway. His
+eyes were wide open, and he seemed to be gazing at them with a smile. A
+thread of blood was trickling from his mouth over the flagstones of the
+porch. A convulsive tremor shook his arm. Then he ceased to move. As he
+lay there, huddled up; he seemed smaller than usual.
+
+On hearing the report of the revolver, Ligny had hurriedly come forward.
+In the darkness of the night he raised the body, and immediately
+lowering it gently to the ground he attempted to strike matches, which
+the wind promptly extinguished. At last, by the flare of one of the
+matches, he saw that the bullet had carried away part of the skull, that
+the meninges were laid bare over an area as large as the palm of the
+hand; this area was grey, oozing blood, and very irregular in shape, its
+outlines reminding Ligny of the map of Africa. He was conscious of a
+sudden feeling of respect in the presence of this dead man. Placing his
+hands under the armpits, he dragged Chevalier with the minutest
+precautions into the room at the side. Leaving him there, he hurried
+through the house in quest of Félicie, calling to her.
+
+He found her in the bedroom, with her head buried under the bed-clothes
+of the unmade bed, crying: "Mamma! Mamma!" and repeating prayers.
+
+"Don't stay here, Félicie."
+
+She went downstairs with him. But, on reaching the hall, she said:
+
+"You know very well that we can't go out that way."
+
+He showed her out by the kitchen door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Left alone in the silent house, Robert de Ligny relit the lamp. Serious
+and even somewhat solemn voices were beginning to speak within him.
+Moulded from childhood by the rules of moral responsibility, he now
+experienced a sensation of painful regret, akin to remorse. Reflecting
+that he had caused the death of this man, albeit without intending it or
+knowing it, he did not feel wholly innocent. Shreds of his philosophic
+and religious training came back to him, disturbing his conscience. The
+phrases of moralists and preachers, learned at school, which had sunk to
+the very depths of his memory, suddenly rose in his mind. Its inward
+voices repeated them to him. They said, quoting some old religious
+orator: "When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to
+those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world, we render
+ourselves liable to commit the most reprehensible actions. We perceive,
+from the most frightful examples, that voluptuousness leads to crime."
+
+These maxims, upon which he had never reflected, suddenly assumed for
+him a precise and austere meaning. He thought the matter over seriously.
+But since his mind was not deeply religious, and since he was incapable
+of cherishing exaggerated scruples, he was conscious of only a passable
+degree of edification, which was steadily diminishing. Before long he
+decided that such scruples were out of place and that they could not
+possibly apply to the situation. "When we abandon ourselves to
+irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in
+the opinion of the world.... We perceive, from the most frightful
+examples...." These phrases, which only a little while ago had
+reverberated through his soul like a peal of thunder, he now heard in
+the snuffling and throaty voices of the professors and priests who had
+taught them to him, and he found them somewhat ridiculous. By a natural
+association of ideas he recalled a passage from an ancient Roman
+history--which he had read, when in the second form, during a certain
+course of study, and which had impressed itself on his mind--a few lines
+concerning a lady who was convicted of adultery and accused of having
+set fire to Rome. "So true it is," ran the historian's comment, "that a
+person who violates the laws of chastity is capable of any crime." He
+smiled inwardly at this recollection, reflecting that the moralists,
+after all, had queer ideas about life.
+
+The wick, which was charring, gave an insufficient light. He could not
+manage to snuff it, and it was giving out a horrible stench of paraffin.
+Thinking of the author of the passage relating to the Roman lady, he
+said to himself: "Sure enough, it was a queer idea that he got hold of
+there!"
+
+He felt reassured as to his innocence. His slight feeling of remorse had
+entirely evaporated, and he was unable to conceive how he could for a
+moment have believed himself responsible for Chevalier's death. Yet the
+affair troubled him.
+
+Suddenly he thought: "Supposing he were still alive!"
+
+A while ago, for the space of a second, by the light of a match blown
+out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor's skull.
+But what if he had seen incorrectly? What if he had taken a mere graze
+of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull? Does a man
+retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and
+horror? A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even
+particularly serious. It had certainly seemed to him that the man was
+dead. But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?
+
+He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and
+muttered:
+
+"This lamp is enough to poison one."
+
+Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr. Socrates, as to the
+origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally:
+
+"This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils."
+
+Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He
+remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing
+his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but
+had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club
+a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his
+brains but merely shot off an ear. These instances applied to Chevalier
+with striking exactitude.
+
+"Supposing he were not dead."
+
+He wished and hoped against all evidence that the unfortunate man might
+still be breathing, that he might be saved. He thought of fetching
+bandages, of giving first aid. Intending to re-examine the man lying in
+the front room, he raised the lamp, which was still emitting an
+insufficient light, too suddenly, and so extinguished it. Whereupon,
+surprised by the sudden darkness, he lost patience and exclaimed:
+
+"Confound the blasted thing!"
+
+While lighting it again, he flattered himself with the idea that
+Chevalier, once taken to hospital, would regain consciousness, and would
+live, and seeing him already on his feet, perched on his long legs,
+bawling, clearing his throat, sneering, his desire for his recovery
+became less eager; he was even beginning to cease to desire it, to
+regard it as annoying and inconsiderate. He asked himself anxiously,
+with a feeling of real uneasiness:
+
+"What in the world would he do if he came back, that dismal actor
+fellow? Would he return to the Odéon? Would he stroll through its
+corridors displaying his great scar? Would he once more have to see him
+prowling round Félicie?"
+
+He held the lighted lamp close to the body and recognized the livid
+bleeding wound, the irregular outline of which reminded him of the
+Africa of his schoolboy maps.
+
+Plainly death had been instantaneous, and he failed to understand how he
+could for a moment have doubted it.
+
+He left the house and proceeded to stride up and down in the garden. The
+image of the wound was flashing before his eyes like the impression
+caused by too bright a light. It moved away from him, increasing in size
+against the black sky; it took the shape of a pale continent whence he
+saw swarms of distracted little blacks pouring forth, armed with bows
+and arrows.
+
+He decided that the first thing to do was to fetch Madame Simonneau, who
+lived close at hand, in the Boulevard Bineau, in the residential part of
+the café. He closed the gate carefully, and went in search of the
+housekeeper. Once on the boulevard, he recovered his equanimity. He felt
+most uncomfortable about the accident; he accepted the accomplished
+fact, but he cavilled at fate in respect of the circumstances. Since
+there had to be a death, he gave his consent that there should be one,
+but he would have preferred another. Toward this one he was conscious of
+a feeling of disgust and repugnance. He said to himself vaguely:
+
+"I concede a suicide. But what is the good of a ridiculous and
+declamatory suicide? Couldn't the fellow have killed himself at home?
+Couldn't he, if his determination was irrevocable, have carried it out
+discreetly, with proper pride? That is what a gentleman would have done
+in his position. Then one might have pitied him, and respected his
+memory."
+
+He recalled word for word his conversation with Félicie in the bedroom
+an hour before the tragedy. He asked her if she had not for a time been
+Chevalier's mistress. He had asked her this, not because he wanted to
+know, for he had very little doubt of it, but in order to show that he
+knew it. And she had replied indignantly: "Chevalier? He? Good gracious
+no! You wouldn't have had me look at him!"
+
+He did not blame her for having lied. All women lie. He rather enjoyed
+the graceful and easy manner with which she had cast the fellow out of
+her past. But he was vexed with her for having given herself to a
+low-down actor. Chevalier spoilt Félicie for him. Why did she take
+lovers of that type? Was she wanting in taste? Did she not exercise a
+certain selection? Did she behave like a woman of the town? Did she lack
+a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may
+not do? Didn't she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing
+that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Félicie for the
+accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus.
+
+Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the
+waiters in the café, the grocer's assistants, the girls at the laundry,
+the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a
+neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her
+face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the
+corpse. He instructed her to cover it with a sheet, and to hold herself
+at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the
+particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please God,
+what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a
+social circle which is obsequious to the constituted authorities and
+respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she
+learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not
+conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him
+to unpleasantness.
+
+"You ought not to have done it," she told him. "When anyone has killed
+himself, you must never touch him before the police come."
+
+Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement
+having passed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because
+events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they
+take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They
+unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a
+succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the
+everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent
+death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circumstances of
+that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and the
+occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary's
+he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on
+his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.
+
+At nine o'clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden
+with his secretary and a policeman. The municipal physician, Monsieur
+Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame
+Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house
+exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles
+which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by
+an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated
+box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a
+candle.
+
+He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had
+just dined.
+
+"The bullet, a large calibre bullet," he said, "penetrated by way of the
+palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left
+parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and
+blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous."
+
+He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:
+
+"Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will
+probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was
+round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction."
+
+However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thin man with
+a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was
+howling outside the garden gate.
+
+"The direction of the wound," said the doctor, "as well as the fingers
+of the right hand, which are still contracted, are more than ample proof
+of suicide."
+
+He lit a cigar.
+
+"We are sufficiently informed," remarked the commissary.
+
+"I regret, gentlemen, to have disturbed you," said Robert de Ligny, "and
+I thank you for the courteous manner in which you have carried out your
+official duties."
+
+The secretary and the police agent, Madame Simonneau showing the way,
+carried the body up to the first floor.
+
+Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel was biting his nails and looking into space.
+
+"A tragedy of jealousy," he remarked, "nothing is more common. We have
+here in Neuilly a steady average of self-inflicted deaths. Out of a
+hundred suicides thirty are caused by gambling. The others are due to
+disappointment in love, poverty, or incurable disease."
+
+"Chevalier?" inquired Dr. Hibry, who was a lover of the theatre,
+"Chevalier? Wait a minute! I have seen him; I saw him at a benefit
+performance, at the Variétés. Of course! He recited a monologue."
+
+The dog howled outside the garden gate.
+
+"You cannot imagine," resumed the commissary, "the disasters caused in
+this municipality by the _pari mutuel_. I am not exaggerating when I
+assert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to
+look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every
+hairdresser's shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last
+week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in
+the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who
+gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another
+quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom
+gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors,
+threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a
+court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?"
+
+"I have it!" exclaimed the physician. "He recited _The Duel in the
+Prairie_. People are rather tired of monologues, but that is very funny.
+You remember! 'Will you fight with the sword?' 'No, sir.' 'The pistol?'
+'No, sir.' 'The sabre, the knife?' 'No, sir.' 'Ah, then, I see what you
+want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I
+agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are
+permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation.' Chevalier used to
+recite _The Duel in the Prairie_ in a very humorous manner. He amused me
+greatly that night. It is true that I am not an ungrateful audience; I
+worship the theatre."
+
+The commissary was not listening. He was following up his own train of
+thought.
+
+"It will never be known, how many fortunes and lives are devoured each
+year by the _pari mutuel_. Gambling never releases its victims; when it
+has despoiled them of everything, it still remains their only hope. What
+else, indeed, will permit them to hope?"
+
+He ceased, straining his ear to catch the distant cry of a newsvendor,
+and rushed out into the avenue in pursuit of the fugitive yelping
+shadow, hailed him, and snatched from him a sporting paper, which he
+spread out under the light of a gas-lamp, scanning its pages for certain
+names of horses: _Fleur-des-pois_, _La Châtelaine_, _Lucrèce_. With
+haggard eyes, trembling hands, dumbfounded, crushed, he dropped the
+sheet: his horse had not won.
+
+And Dr. Hibry, observing him from a distance, reflected that some day,
+in his capacity of physician to the dead, he might well be called upon
+to certify the suicide of his commissary of police, and he made up his
+mind in advance to conclude, as far as possible, that his death was due
+to accidental causes.
+
+Suddenly he seized his umbrella.
+
+"I must be off," he said. "I have been given a seat for the
+Opéra-Comique to-night. It would be a pity to waste it."
+
+Before leaving the house, Ligny asked Madame Simonneau:
+
+"Where have you put him?"
+
+"In the bed," replied Madame Simonneau. "It was more decent."
+
+He made no objection, and raising his eyes to the front of the house, he
+saw at the windows of the bedroom, through the muslin curtains, the
+light of the two candles which the housekeeper had placed on the bedside
+table.
+
+"Perhaps," he said, "one might get a nun to watch by him."
+
+"It's not necessary," replied Madame Simonneau, who had invited some
+neighbours of her own sex, and had ordered her wine and meat. "It's not
+necessary, I will watch by him myself."
+
+Ligny did not press the point.
+
+The dog was still howling outside the gate.
+
+Returning on foot to the barrier, he noticed, over Paris, a reddish glow
+which filled the whole sky. Above the chimney-pots the factory chimneys
+rose grotesque and black, against this fiery mist, seeming to look down
+with a ridiculous familiarity upon the mysterious conflagration of a
+world. The few passers-by whom he met on the boulevard strolled along
+quietly, without raising their heads. Although he knew that when cities
+are wrapped in night the moist atmosphere often reflects the lights,
+becoming tinged with this uniform glow, which shines without a flicker,
+he fancied that he was looking at the reflection of a vast fire. He
+accepted, without reflection, the idea that Paris was sinking into the
+abyss of a prodigious conflagration; he found it natural that the
+private catastrophe in which he had become involved should be merged
+into a public disaster and that this same night should be for a whole
+population, as for him! a night of sinister happenings.
+
+Being extremely hungry, he took a cab at the barrier, and had himself
+driven to a restaurant in the Rue Royale. In the bright, warm room he
+was conscious of a sense of well-being. After ordering his meal, he
+opened an evening newspaper and saw, in the Parliamentary report, that
+his Minister had delivered a speech. On reading it, he smothered a
+slight laugh; he remembered certain stories told at the Quai d'Orsay.
+The Minister of Foreign Affairs was enamoured of Madame de Neuilles, an
+elderly lady with a lurid past, whom public rumour had raised to the
+status of adventuress and spy. He was wont, it was whispered, to try on
+her the speeches which he was to deliver in the Chamber. Ligny, who had
+formerly been to a certain small extent the lover of Madame de Neuilles,
+pictured to himself the statesman in his shirt reciting to his lady-love
+the following statement of principles: "Far be it from me to disregard
+the legitimate susceptibilities of the national sentiment. Resolutely
+pacific, but jealous of France's honour, the Government will, etc." This
+vision put him in a merry mood. He turned the page, and read: To-morrow
+at the Odéon, first performance (in this theatre) of _La Nuit du 23
+octobre 1812_ with Messieurs Durville, Maury, Romilly, Destrée, Vicar,
+Léon Clim, Valroche, Aman, Chevalier....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+At one o'clock on the following day _La Grille_ was in rehearsal, for
+the first time, in the green-room of the theatre. A dismal light spread
+like a pall over the grey stones of the roof, the galleries, and the
+columns. In the depressing majesty of this pallid architecture, beneath
+the statue of Racine, the leading actors were reading before Pradel, the
+manager of the house, their parts, which they did not yet know. Romilly,
+the stage manager, and Constantine Marc, the author of the piece, were
+all three seated on a red velvet sofa, while, from a bench set back
+between two columns, was exhaled the vigilant hatred and whispered
+jealousy of the actresses left out of the cast.
+
+The lover, Paul Delage, was with difficulty deciphering a speech:
+
+"'I recognize the château with its brick walls, its slated roof; the
+park, where I have so often entwined her initials and mine on the bark
+of the trees; the pond whose slumbering waters....'"
+
+Fagette rebuked him:
+
+"'Beware, Aimeri, lest the château know you not again, lest the park
+forget your name, lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"
+
+But she had a cold, and was reading from a manuscript copy full of
+mistakes.
+
+"Don't stand there, Fagette: it's the summer-house," said Romilly.
+
+"How do you expect me to know that?"
+
+"There's a chair put there."
+
+"'Lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"
+
+"Mademoiselle Nanteuil, it's your cue----Where has Nanteuil got to?
+Nanteuil!"
+
+Nanteuil came forward muffled up in her furs, her little bag and her
+part in her hand, white as a sheet, her eyes sunken, her legs nerveless.
+When fully awake she had seen the dead man enter her bedroom.
+
+She inquired:
+
+"Where do I make my entrance from?"
+
+"From the right."
+
+"All right."
+
+And she read:
+
+"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning, I do not know why it
+was. Can you perhaps tell me?'"
+
+Delage read his reply:
+
+"'It may be, Cécile, that it was due to a special dispensation of
+Providence or of fate. The God who loves you suffers you to smile, in
+the hour of weeping and the gnashing of teeth.'"
+
+"Nanteuil, my darling, you cross the stage," said Romilly. "Delage,
+stand aside a bit to let her pass."
+
+Nanteuil crossed over.
+
+"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them.
+They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"
+
+Romilly interrupted:
+
+"Delage, efface yourself a trifle; be careful not to hide her from the
+audience. Once more, Nanteuil."
+
+Nanteuil repeated:
+
+"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them.
+They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"
+
+Constantin Marc no longer recognized his handiwork, he could no longer
+even hear the sound of his beloved phrases, which he had so often
+repeated to himself in the Vivarais woods. Dumbfounded and dazed, he
+held his peace.
+
+Nanteuil tripped daintily across the stage, and resumed reading her
+part:
+
+"'You will perhaps think me very foolish, Aimeri; in the convent where I
+was brought up, I often used to envy the fate of the victims.'"
+
+Delage took up his cue, but he had overlooked a page of the manuscript:
+
+"'The weather is magnificent. Already the guests are strolling about the
+garden.'"
+
+It became necessary to start all over again.
+
+"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri....'"
+
+And so they proceeded, without troubling to understand, but careful to
+regulate their movements, as if studying the figures of a dance.
+
+"In the interests of the play, we shall have to make some cuts," said
+Pradel to the dismayed author.
+
+And Delage continued:
+
+"'Do not blame me, Cécile: I felt for you a friendship dating from
+childhood, one of those fraternal friendships which impart to the love
+which springs from them a disquieting appearance of incest.'"
+
+"Incest," shouted Pradel. "You cannot let the word 'incest' remain,
+Monsieur Constantin Marc. The public has susceptibilities of which you
+have no idea. Moreover, the order of the two speeches which follow must
+be transposed. The optics of the stage require it."
+
+The rehearsal was interrupted. Romilly caught sight of Durville who, in
+a recess, was telling racy stories.
+
+"Durville, you can go. The second act will not be rehearsed to-day."
+
+Before leaving, the old actor went up to Nanteuil, to press her hand.
+Judging that this was the moment to assure her of his sympathy, he
+summoned up the tears to his eyes, as anyone condoling with her would
+have done in his place. But he did it admirably. The pupils of his eyes
+swam in their orbits, like the moon amid clouds. The corners of his lips
+were turned down in two deep furrows which prolonged them to the bottom
+of his chin. He appeared to be genuinely afflicted.
+
+"My poor darling," he sighed, "I pity you, I do indeed! To see one for
+whom one has experienced a--feeling--with whom one has--lived in
+intimacy--to see him carried off at a blow--a tragic blow--is hard, is
+terrible!"
+
+And he extended his compassionate hands. Nanteuil, completely unnerved,
+and crushing her tiny handkerchief and her part in her hands, turned her
+back upon him, and hissed between her teeth:
+
+"Old idiot!"
+
+Fagette passed her arm round her waist, and led her gently aside to the
+foot of Racine's statue, where she whispered into her ear:
+
+"Listen to me, my dear. This affair must be completely hushed up.
+Everybody is talking about it. If you let people talk, they will brand
+you for life as Chevalier's widow."
+
+Then, being something of a talker, she added:
+
+"I know you, I am your best friend. I know your value. But beware,
+Félicie: women are held at their own valuation."
+
+Every one of Fagette's shafts told. Nanteuil, with fiery cheeks, held
+back her tears. Too young to possess or even to desire the prudence
+which comes to celebrated actresses when of an age to graduate as women
+of the world of fashion, she was full of self-esteem, and since she had
+known what it was to love another she was eager to efface everything
+unfashionable from her past; she felt that Chevalier, in killing himself
+for her sake, had behaved towards her publicly with a familiarity which
+made her ridiculous. Still unaware that all things fall into oblivion,
+and are lost in the swift current of our days, that all our actions flow
+like the waters of a river, between banks that have no memory, she
+pondered, irritated and dejected, at the feet of Jean Racine, who
+understood her grief.
+
+"Just look at her," said Madame Marie-Claire to young Delage. "She wants
+to cry. I understand her. A man killed himself for me. I was greatly
+upset by it. He was a count."
+
+"Well, begin again!" shouted Pradel. "Come now, Mademoiselle Nanteuil,
+your cue!"
+
+Whereupon Nanteuil:
+
+"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"
+
+Suddenly, Madame Doulce appeared. Ponderous and mournful, she let fall
+the following words:
+
+"I have very sad news. The parish priest will not allow him to enter his
+church."
+
+As Chevalier had no relations left other than a sister, a working-woman
+at Pantin, Madame Doulce had undertaken to make arrangements for the
+funeral at the expense of the members of the company.
+
+They gathered round her. She continued:
+
+"The Church rejects him as though he were accurst! That's dreadful!"
+
+"Why?" asked Romilly.
+
+Madame Doulce replied in a very low tone and as if reluctantly:
+
+"Because he committed suicide."
+
+"We must see to this," said Pradel.
+
+Romilly displayed an eager desire to be of service.
+
+"The curé knows me," he said. "He is a very decent fellow. I'll just run
+over to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, and I'd be greatly surprised if----"
+
+Madame Doulce shook her head sadly:
+
+"All is useless."
+
+"All the same, we must have a religious service," said Romilly, with all
+the authority of a stage-manager.
+
+"Quite so," said Madame Doulce.
+
+Madame Marie-Claire, deeply exercised in her mind, was of opinion that
+the priests could be compelled to say a Mass.
+
+"Let us keep cool," said Pradel, caressing his venerable beard. "Under
+Louis VIII the people broke in the doors of Saint-Roch, which had been
+closed to the coffin of Mademoiselle Raucourt. We live in other times,
+and under different circumstances. We must have recourse to gentler
+methods."
+
+Constantin Marc, seeing to his great regret that his play was abandoned,
+had likewise approached Madame Doulce; he inquired of her:
+
+"Why should you want Chevalier to be blessed by the Church? Personally,
+I am a Catholic. With me, it is not a faith, it is a system, and I look
+upon it as a duty to participate in all the external practices of
+worship. I am on the side of all authorities. I am for the judge, the
+soldier, the priest. I cannot therefore be suspected of favouring civil
+burials. But I hardly understand why you persist in offering the curé of
+Saint-Étienne-du-Mont a dead body which he repudiates. Now why do you
+want this unfortunate Chevalier to go to church?"
+
+"Why?" replied Madame Doulce. "For the salvation of his soul and because
+it is more seemly."
+
+"What would be seemly," replied Constantin Marc, "would be to obey the
+laws of the Church, which excommunicates suicides."
+
+"Monsieur Constantin Marc, have you read _Les Soirées de Neuilly_?"
+inquired Pradel, who was an ardent collector of old books and a great
+reader. "What, you have not read _Les Soirées de Neuilly_, by Monsieur
+de Fongeray? You have missed something. It is a curious book, which can
+still be met with sometimes on the quays. It is adorned by a lithograph
+of Henry Monnier's, which is, I don't know why, a caricature of
+Stendhal. Fongeray is the pseudonym of two Liberals of the Restoration,
+Dittmer and Cavé. The work consists of comedies and dramas which cannot
+be acted; but which contain some most interesting scenes representing
+manners and customs. You will read in it how, in the reign of Charles X,
+a vicar of one of the Paris churches, the Abbé Mouchaud, would refuse
+burial to a pious lady, and would, at all costs, grant it to an atheist.
+Madame d'Hautefeuille was religious, but she held some national
+property. At her death, she received the ministrations of a Jansenist
+priest. For this reason, after her death, the Abbé Mouchaud refused to
+receive her into the church in which she had passed her life. At the
+same time, in the same parish, Monsieur Dubourg, a big banker, was good
+enough to die. In his will he stipulated that he should be borne
+straight to the cemetery. 'He is a Catholic,' reflected the Abbé
+Mouchaud, 'he belongs to us.' Quickly making a parcel of his stole and
+surplice, he rushed off to the dead man's house, administered extreme
+unction, and brought him into his church."
+
+"Well," replied Constantin Marc, "that vicar was an excellent
+politician. Atheists are not formidable enemies of the Church. They do
+not count as adversaries. They cannot raise a Church against her, and
+they do not dream of doing so. Atheists have existed at all times among
+the heads and princes of the Church, and many of them have rendered
+signal services to the Papacy. On the other hand, whoever does not
+submit strictly to ecclesiastical discipline and breaks away from
+tradition upon a single point, whoever sets up a faith against the
+faith, an opinion, a practices against the accepted opinion and the
+common practice, is a factor of disorder, a menace of peril, and must be
+extirpated. This the vicar, Mouchaud, understood. He should have been
+made a Cardinal."
+
+Madame Doulce, who had been clever enough not to tell everything in a
+breath, went on to say:
+
+"I did not allow myself to be discomfited by the opposition of Monsieur
+le Curé. I begged, I entreated. And his answer was: 'We owe respectful
+obedience to the Ordinary. Go to the Archbishop's Palace. I will do as
+Monseigneur bids me.' There is nothing left for me but to follow this
+advice. I'm hurrying off to the Archbishop's Palace."
+
+"Let us get to work," said Pradel.
+
+Romilly called to Nanteuil:
+
+"Nanteuil! Come, Nanteuil, begin your whole scene over again."
+
+And Nanteuil said once more:
+
+"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The prominence given by the Press to the suicide of the Boulevard de
+Villiers rendered the negotiations between the Stage and the Church all
+the more difficult. The reporters had given the fullest details of the
+event, and it was pointed out by the Abbé Mirabelle, the Archbishop's
+second vicar, that to open the doors of the parish church to Chevalier,
+as matters then stood, was to proclaim that excommunicated persons were
+entitled to the prayers of the Church.
+
+But for that matter, Monsieur Mirabelle himself, who in this affair
+displayed great wisdom and circumspection, paved the way to a solution.
+
+"You must fully understand," he observed to Madame Doulce, "that the
+opinion of the newspapers cannot affect our decision. We are absolutely
+indifferent to it, and we do not disturb ourselves in the slightest
+degree, no matter what fifty public sheets may say about the unfortunate
+young fellow. Whether the journalists have told the truth or distorted
+it is their affair, not mine. I do not know and I do not wish to know
+what they have written. But the fact of the suicide is notorious. You
+cannot dispute it. It would now be advisable to investigate closely, and
+by the light of science, the circumstances in which the deed was
+committed. Do not be surprised by my thus invoking the aid of science.
+Science has no better friend than religion. Now medical science may in
+the present case be of great assistance to us. You will understand in a
+moment. Mother Church ejects the suicide from her bosom only when his
+act is an act of despair. The madmen who attempt their own lives are not
+those who have lost all hope, and the Church does not deny them her
+prayers; she prays for all who are unfortunate. Now, if it could be
+proved that this poor boy had acted under the influence of a high fever
+or of a mental disorder, if a medical man were in a position to certify
+that the poor fellow was not in possession of his faculties when he slew
+himself with his own hand, there would be no obstacle to the celebration
+of a religious service."
+
+Having hearkened to the words of Monsieur l'Abbé Mirabelle, Madame
+Doulce hastened back to the theatre. The rehearsal of _La Grille_ was
+over. She found Pradel in his office with a couple of young actresses,
+one of whom was soliciting an engagement, the other, leave of absence.
+He refused, in conformity with his principle never to grant a request
+until he had first refused it. In this way he bestowed a value upon his
+most trifling concessions. His glistening eyes and his patriarchal
+beard, his manner, at once amorous and paternal, gave him a resemblance
+to Lot, as we see him between his two daughters in the prints of the Old
+Masters. Standing on the table was an amphora of gilt pasteboard which
+fostered this illusion.
+
+"It can't be done," he was telling each of them. "It really can't be
+done, my child----Well, after all, look in to-morrow."
+
+Having dismissed them, he inquired, as he signed some letters:
+
+"Well, Madame Doulce, what news do you bring?"
+
+Constantin Marc, appearing with Nanteuil, hastily exclaimed:
+
+"What about my scenery, Monsieur Pradel?"
+
+Thereupon he described for the twentieth time the landscape, upon which
+the curtain ought to rise.
+
+"In the foreground, an old park. The trunks of the great trees, on the
+north side, are green with moss. The dampness of the soil must be felt."
+
+And the manager replied:
+
+"You may rest assured that everything that can be done will be done, and
+that it will be most appropriate. Well, Madame Doulce, what news?"
+
+"There is a glimmer of hope," she replied.
+
+"At the back, in a slight mist," said the author, "the grey stones and
+the slate roofs of the Abbaye-aux-Dames."
+
+"Quite so. Pray be seated, Madame Doulce; you have my attention."
+
+"I was most courteously received at the Archbishop's Palace," said
+Madame Doulce.
+
+"Monsieur Pradel, it is imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should
+appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists
+of coming night. A pale-gold sky----"
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbé Mirabelle," resumed Madame Doulce, "is a priest of the
+highest distinction----"
+
+"Monsieur Marc, are you particularly keen on your pale-gold sky?"
+inquired the stage manager. "Go on, Madame Doulce, go on, I am listening
+to you."
+
+"And exquisitely polite. He made a delicate allusion to the
+indiscretions of the newspapers----"
+
+At this moment Monsieur Marchegeay, the stage manager, burst into the
+room. His green eyes were glittering, and his red moustache was dancing
+like a flame. The words rolled off his tongue:
+
+"They are at it again! Lydie, the little super, is screaming like a
+stoat on the stairs. She says Delage tried to violate her. It's at least
+the tenth time in a month that she has come out with that story. This
+is an infernal nuisance!"
+
+"Such conduct cannot be tolerated in a house like this," said Pradel.
+"You'll have to fine Delage. Pray continue, Madame Doulce."
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbé Mirabelle explained to me in the clearest manner that
+suicide is an act of despair."
+
+But Constantin Marc was inquiring of Pradel with interest, whether
+Lydie, the little super, was pretty.
+
+"You have seen her in _La Nuit du 23 octobre_; she plays the woman of
+the people who, in the Plaine de Grenelle, is buying wafers of Madame
+Ravaud."
+
+"A very pretty girl, to my thinking," said Constantin Marc.
+
+"Undoubtedly," responded Pradel. "But she would be still prettier if her
+ankles weren't like stakes."
+
+And Constantin Marc musingly replied.
+
+"And Delage has outraged her. That fellow possesses the sense of love.
+Love is a simple and primitive act. It's a struggle, it's hatred.
+Violence is necessary to it. Love by mutual consent is merely a tedious
+obligation."
+
+And he cried, greatly excited.
+
+"Delage is prodigious!"
+
+"Don't get yourself into a fix," said Pradel.
+
+"This same little Lydie entices my actors into her dressing-room, and
+then all of a sudden she screams out that she is being outraged in order
+to get hush-money out of them. It's her lover who has taught her the
+trick, and takes the coin. You were saying, Madame Doulce----"
+
+"After a long and interesting conversation," resumed Madame Doulce,
+"Monsieur l'Abbé Mirabelle suggested a favourable solution. He gave me
+to understand that, in order to remove all difficulties, it would be
+sufficient for a physician to certify that Chevalier was not in full
+possession of his faculties, and that he was not responsible for his
+acts."
+
+"But," observed Pradel, "Chevalier wasn't insane. He was in full
+possession of his faculties."
+
+"It's not for us to say," replied Madame Doulce. "What do we know about
+it?"
+
+"No," said Nanteuil, "he was not in full possession of his faculties."
+
+Pradel shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"After all, it's possible. Insanity and reason, it's a matter of
+appreciation. To whom could we apply for a certificate?"
+
+Madame Doulce and Pradel called to mind three physicians in succession;
+but they were unable to find the address of the first; the second was
+bad-tempered, and it was decided that the third was dead.
+
+Nanteuil suggested that they should approach Dr. Trublet.
+
+"That's an idea!" exclaimed Pradel. "Let us ask a certificate of Dr.
+Socrates. What's to-day? Friday. It's his day for consultations. We
+shall find him at home."
+
+Dr. Trublet lived in an old house at the top of the Rue de Seine. Pradel
+took Nanteuil with him, with the idea that Socrates would refuse nothing
+to a pretty woman. Constantin Marc, who could not live, when in Paris,
+save in the company of theatrical folk, accompanied them. The Chevalier
+affair was beginning to amuse him. He found it theatrical, that is,
+appropriate to theatrical performers. Although the hour for
+consultations was over, the doctor's sitting-room was still full of
+people in search of healing. Trublet dismissed them, and received his
+theatrical friends in his private room. He was standing in front of a
+table encumbered with books and papers. An adjustable arm-chair, infirm
+and cynical, displayed itself by the window. The director of the Odéon
+set forth the object of his call, and ended by saying:
+
+"Chevalier's funeral service cannot be celebrated in the church unless
+you certify that the unfortunate young man was not altogether sane."
+
+Dr. Trublet declared that Chevalier might very well do without a
+religious service.
+
+"Adrienne Lecouvreur, who was of more account than Chevalier, did
+without one. Mademoiselle Monime had no Mass said for her after her
+death, and, as you are aware, she was denied 'the honour of rotting in a
+nasty cemetery in the company of all the beggars of the quarter.' She
+was none the worse off for that."
+
+"You are not ignorant of the fact, Dr. Socrates," replied Pradel, "that
+actors and actresses are the most religious of people. My company would
+be deeply grieved if they could not be present at the celebration of a
+Mass for their colleague. They have already secured the co-operation of
+several lyric artists, and the music will be very fine."
+
+"Now that's a reason," said Trublet "I do not gainsay it. Charles
+Monselet, who was a witty fellow, was reflecting, only a few hours
+before his death, on his musical Mass, 'I know a great many singers at
+the Opéra,' he said, 'I shall have a _Pie Jésu aux truffes_.' But, as on
+this occasion the Archbishop does not authorize a spiritual concert, it
+would be more convenient to postpone it to some other occasion."
+
+"As far as I am concerned," replied the director, "I have no religious
+belief. But I consider that the Church and the Stage are two great
+social powers, and that it is beneficial that they should be friends and
+allies. For my own part, I never lose an opportunity of sealing the
+alliance. This coming Lent, I shall have Durville read one of
+Bourdaloue's sermons. I receive a State subsidy. I must observe the
+Concordat. Moreover, whatever people may say, Catholicism is the most
+acceptable form of religious indifference."
+
+"Well then," objected Constantin Marc, "since you wish to show deference
+to the Church, why do you foist upon her, by force or by subterfuge, a
+coffin which she doesn't want?"
+
+The doctor spoke in a similar strain, and ended by saying.
+
+"My dear Pradel, don't you have anything more to do with the matter."
+
+"Whereupon Nanteuil, her eyes blazing, her voice sibilant, cried:
+
+"He must go to church, doctor; sign what is asked of you, write that he
+was not in possession of his faculties, I entreat you."
+
+There was not religion alone at the back of this desire. Blended with it
+was an intimate feeling, an obscure background of old beliefs, of which
+she herself was unaware. She hoped that if he were carried into the
+church, and sprinkled with holy water, Chevalier would be appeased,
+would become one of the peaceful dead, and would no longer torment her.
+She feared, on the other hand, that if he were deprived of benediction
+and prayers he would perpetually hover about her, accursed and
+maleficent. And, more simply still, in her dread of seeing him again,
+she was anxious that the priests should take good care to bury him, and
+that everybody should attend the funeral, so that he should be all the
+more thoroughly buried; as thoroughly buried, in short, as it was
+possible to be. Her lips trembled and she wrung her hands.
+
+Trublet, who had long graduated in human nature, watched her with
+interest. He understood and took a special interest in the female of the
+human machine. This particular specimen filled him with joy. His
+snub-nosed face beamed with delight as he watched her.
+
+"Don't be uneasy, child. There is always a way of coming to an
+understanding with the Church. What you are asking me is not within my
+powers; I am a lay doctor. But we have to-day, thank God, religious
+physicians who send their patients to the ecclesiastical waters, and
+whose special function is to attest miraculous cures. I know one who
+lives in this part of the town; I'll give you his address. Go and see
+him; the Bishop will refuse him nothing. He will arrange the matter for
+you."
+
+"Not at all," said Pradel. "You always attended poor Chevalier. It is
+for you to give a certificate."
+
+Romilly agreed:
+
+"Of course, doctor. You are the physician to the theatre. We must wash
+our dirty linen at home."
+
+At the same time, Nanteuil turned upon Socrates a gaze of entreaty.
+
+"But," objected Trublet, "what do you want me to say?"
+
+"It's very simple," Pradel replied. "Say that he was to a certain extent
+irresponsible."
+
+"You are simply asking me to speak like a police surgeon. It's expecting
+too much of me."
+
+"You believe then, doctor, that Chevalier was fully and entirely morally
+responsible?"
+
+"Quite the contrary. I am of opinion that he was not in the least
+responsible for his actions."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"But I also consider that, in this respect, he differed in nowise from
+you, myself, and all other men. My judicial colleagues distinguish
+between individual responsibilities. They have procedures by which they
+recognize full responsibilities, and those which lack one or more
+fractional parts. It is a remarkable fact, moreover, that in order to
+get a poor wretch condemned they always find him fully responsible. May
+we not therefore consider that their own responsibility is full--like
+the moon?"
+
+And Dr. Socrates proceeded to unfold before the astonished stage folk a
+comprehensive theory of universal determinism. He went back to the
+origins of life, and, like the Silenus of Virgil, who, smeared with the
+juice of mulberries, sang to the shepherds of Sicily and the naiad
+Aglaia of the origin of the world, he broke out into a flood of words:
+
+"To call upon a poor wretch to answer for his actions! Why, even when
+the solar system was still no more than a pale nebula, forming, in the
+ether, a fragile halo, whose circumference was a thousand times greater
+than the orbit of Neptune, we had all of us, for ages past, been fully
+conditioned, determined and irrevocably destined, and your
+responsibility, my dear child, my responsibility, Chevalier's, and that
+of all men, had been, not mitigated, but abolished beforehand. All our
+movements, the result of previous movements of matter, are subject to
+the laws which govern the cosmic forces, and the human mechanism is
+merely a particular instance of the universal mechanism."
+
+Pointing to a locked cupboard, he proceeded.
+
+"I have there, contained in bottles, that which would transform,
+destroy, or excite to frenzy the will of fifty thousand men."
+
+"Wouldn't be playing the game," objected Pradel.
+
+"I agree, it wouldn't be playing the game. But these substances are not
+essentially laboratory products. The laboratory combines, it does not
+create anything. These substances are scattered throughout nature. In
+their free state, they surround and enter into us, they determine our
+will, they circumscribe our freedom of device, which is merely the
+illusion engendered within us by the ignorance of our determinations."
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" asked Pradel, taken aback.
+
+"I mean that our will is an illusion caused by our ignorance of the
+causes which compel us to exert our will. That which wills within us is
+not ourselves, but myriads of cells of prodigious activity, of which we
+know nothing, which are unaware of us, which are ignorant of one
+another, but which nevertheless constitute us. By means of their
+restlessness they produce innumerable currents which we call our
+passions, our thoughts, our joys, our sufferings, our desires, our
+fears, and our will. We believe that we are our own masters, while a
+mere drop of alcohol stimulates, and then benumbs the very elements by
+which we feel and will."
+
+Constantin Marc interrupted the physician:
+
+"Excuse me! Since you are speaking of the action of alcohol, I should
+like your advice on the subject. I am in the habit of drinking a small
+glass of Armagnac brandy after each meal. That's not too much, is it?"
+
+"It's a great deal too much. Alcohol is a poison. If you have a bottle
+of brandy at home, fling it out of the window."
+
+Pradel was pondering. He considered that in suppressing will and
+responsibility in all human things Dr. Socrates was doing him a personal
+injury.
+
+"You may say what you like. Will and responsibility are not illusions.
+They are tangible and powerful realities. I know how the terms of my
+contract bind me, and I impose my will on others."
+
+And he added with some bitterness:
+
+"I believe in the will, in moral responsibility, in the distinction
+between good and evil. Doubtless these are, according to you, stupid
+ideas."
+
+"They are indeed stupid ideas," replied the physician, "but they are
+very suitable to us, since we are mere animals. We are for ever
+forgetting this. They are stupid, venerable, wholesome ideas. Men have
+felt that, without these ideas, they would all go mad. They had only the
+choice between stupidity and madness. Very reasonably they chose
+stupidity. Such is the foundation of moral ideas."
+
+"What a paradox!" exclaimed Romilly.
+
+The physician calmly proceeded:
+
+"The distinction between good and evil in human societies has never
+emerged from the grossest empiricism. It was constituted in a wholly
+practical spirit and as a simple convenience. We do not trouble
+ourselves about it where cut-glass or a tree is concerned. We practise
+moral indifference with regard to animals. We practise it in the case of
+savage races. This enables us to exterminate them without remorse.
+That's what is known as the colonial policy. Nor do we find that
+believers exact a high degree of morality from their god. In the present
+state of society, they would not willingly admit that he was lecherous
+or compromised himself with women; but they do think it fitting that he
+should be vindictive and cruel. Morality is a mutual agreement to keep
+what we possess: land, houses, furniture, women, and our lives. It does
+not imply, in the case of those who bow to it, any particular
+intelligence or character. It is instinctive and ferocious. Written law
+follows it closely, and is in more or less harmonious agreement with it.
+Hence we see that great-hearted men, or men of brilliant genius, have
+almost all been accused of impiety, and, like Socrates, the son of
+Phenaretes, and Benoît Malon, have been smitten by the tribunals of
+their country. And it may be stated that a man who has not, at the very
+least, been sentenced to imprisonment does little credit to the land of
+his fathers."
+
+"There are exceptions," remarked Pradel.
+
+"Few," replied Dr. Trublet.
+
+But Nanteuil, pursuing her idea, remarked.
+
+"My little Socrates, you can very well certify that he was insane. It is
+the truth. He was not sane, I know it only too well."
+
+"No doubt he was mad, my dear child. But it is a question of determining
+whether he was madder than other men. The entire history of humanity,
+replete with tortures, ecstasies, and massacres, is the history of
+raving, demented creatures."
+
+"Doctor," inquired Constantin Marc, "are you by chance one of those who
+do not admire War? It is nevertheless a magnificent thing, when you come
+to think of it. The animals merely eat one another. Men have conceived
+the idea of beautiful massacres. They have learnt to kill one another in
+glittering cuirasses, in helmets topped with plumes, or maned with
+scarlet. By the use of artillery, and the art of fortification, they
+have introduced chemistry and mathematics among the necessary means of
+destruction. War is a sublime invention. And, since the extermination of
+human beings appears to us the only object of life, the wisdom of man
+resides in this, that he has made this extermination a delight and a
+splendour. After all, doctor, you cannot deny that murder is a law of
+nature, and that it is consequently divine."
+
+To which Dr. Socrates replied:
+
+"We are only miserable animals, and yet we are our own providence and
+our own gods. The lower animals, whose immemorial reign preceded our own
+upon this planet, have transformed it by their genius and their courage.
+The insects have traced roads, excavated the soil, hollowed the trunks
+of trees and rocks, built dwellings, founded cities, metamorphosed the
+soil, the air, and the waters. The labour of the humblest of these, that
+of the madrepores, has created islands and continents. Every material
+change produces a moral change, since morals depend upon environment.
+The transformation to which man in his turn has subjected the earth is
+undoubtedly more profound and more harmonious than the transformation
+wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing
+nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity,
+miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in
+suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why
+indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a
+great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is
+possible that our race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania,
+dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness.
+This world is perhaps irremediably wicked. At all events, I shall have
+got plenty of amusement out of it. It affords those who are in it an
+interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was
+madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat."
+
+Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to
+the doctor.
+
+He began to write:
+
+"Having been called on several occasions to attend----"
+
+He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier's Christian name.
+
+"Aimé," replied Nanteuil.
+
+"Aimé Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of
+sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of----"
+
+He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.
+
+"It's a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my
+diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases."
+
+He turned over the leaves of the book.
+
+"Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the
+eighteenth lecture, page 389: 'Many madmen are to be met with among
+actors.' This remark of Professor Ball's reminds me that the celebrated
+Cabanis one day asked Dr. Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a
+cause of madness."
+
+"Really?" asked Romilly uneasily.
+
+"Not a doubt of it," replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball
+says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are
+excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among
+medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are
+the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is
+the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius
+are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, a man is not a
+reasoning being merely because he is an idiot."
+
+After glancing a little further through the pages of Professor Ball's
+lectures, he resumed his writing:
+
+"Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into
+consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there
+is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity,
+which, according to the highest authorities, is merely an exaggeration
+of the habitual temperament of the individual, and hence it is not
+possible to credit him with full moral responsibility."
+
+He signed the sheet and handed it to Pradel, saying:
+
+"Here's something that is innocuous and too devoid of meaning to contain
+the slightest falsehood."
+
+Pradel rose and said:
+
+"Believe me, my dear doctors we should not have asked you to tell a
+lie."
+
+"Why not? I am a medical man. I keep a lie-shop. I relieve, I console.
+How is it possible to relieve and console without lying?"
+
+Then, with a sympathetic glance at Nanteuil; he added:
+
+"Only women and physicians know how necessary untruthfulness is, and how
+beneficial to man."
+
+And, as Pradel, Constantin Mate, and Romilly were taking their leave, he
+said:
+
+"Pray go out by the dining-room. I've just received a small cask of old
+Armagnac. You'll tell me what you think of it!"
+
+Nanteuil had remained behind in the doctor's consulting room.
+
+"My little Socrates, I have spent an awful night. I saw him."
+
+"During your sleep?"
+
+"No, when wide awake."
+
+"You are sure you were not sleeping?"
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+He was on the point of asking her if the apparition had spoken to her.
+But he left the question unspoken, fearing lest he might suggest to so
+sensitive a subject those hallucinations of the sense of hearing, which,
+by reason of their imperious nature, he dreaded far more than visual
+hallucinations. He was familiar with the docility of the sick in obeying
+orders given them by voices. Abandoning the idea of questioning Félicie,
+he resolved, at all hazards, to remove any scruples of conscience which
+might be troubling her. At the same time, having observed that,
+generally speaking, the sense of moral responsibility is weak in women,
+he made no great effort in that direction, and contented himself with
+remarking lightly:
+
+"My dear child, you must not consider yourself responsible for the death
+of that poor fellow. A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable
+termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits
+suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an
+accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which
+should not be exaggerated."
+
+Thinking that he had said enough on this score, he applied himself
+immediately to dispersing the terrors which surrounded her. He sought to
+convince her by simple arguments that she was beholding images which had
+no reality, mere reflections of her own thoughts. In order to
+illustrate his demonstration, he told her a story of a reassuring
+nature.
+
+"An English physician," he told her, "was attending a lady, like
+yourself, highly intelligent, who, like yourself, was in the habit of
+seeing cats under her furniture, and was visited by phantoms. He
+convinced her that these apparitions corresponded to nothing in reality.
+She believed him, and worried herself no longer. One fine day, after a
+long period of retirement, she reappeared in society, and on entering a
+drawing-room she saw the lady of the house who, pointing to an
+arm-chair, begged her to be seated. She also saw, seated in this chair,
+a crafty-looking old gentleman. She argued to herself that one of the
+two persons was necessarily a creature of the imagination, and, deciding
+that the gentleman had no real existence, she sat down on the arm-chair.
+On touching the bottom, she drew a long breath. From that day onward,
+she never again set eyes on any further phantoms, either of man or of
+beast. When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had
+smothered them all--fundamentally."
+
+Félicie shook her head, saying:
+
+"That does not apply to this case."
+
+She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on
+whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits
+without some object. But she feared to speak of these things; and,
+letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.
+
+Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these
+disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that
+they soon vanished without leaving any traces.
+
+"I myself," he said, "once had a vision."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago. It was in Egypt."
+
+He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the
+story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights,
+in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.
+
+"In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the
+February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I
+proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples
+in the desert. These trips across the sands are made on donkey-back. The
+last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey
+Rameses was stronger than the others. This donkey-boy, whose name was
+Selim, was also stronger, slenderer, and better looking than the other
+donkey-boys. He was fifteen years old. His shy, gentle eyes shone from
+behind a magnificent veil of long black lashes; his brown face was a
+pure clear-cut oval. He tramped barefoot through the desert with a step
+which made one think of those dances of warriors of which the Bible
+speaks. His every movement was graceful; his young animal-like gaiety
+was charming. As he prodded Rameses' back with the point of his stick,
+he would chatter to me in a limited vocabulary in which English, French
+and Arabic were intermingled; he enjoyed telling me of the travellers
+whom he had escorted and who, he believed, were all princes or
+princesses; but if I asked him about his relations or his companions he
+remained silent, and assumed an air of indifference and boredom. When
+cadging for a promise of substantial baksheesh, the nasal twang of his
+voice assumed caressing inflexions. He thought out subtle stratagems and
+expended whole treasuries of prayers in order to obtain a cigarette.
+Noticing that I liked to see the donkey-boys treat their beasts with
+kindness, he used, in my presence, to kiss Rameses on the nostrils, and
+when we halted he would waltz with him. He often displayed real
+ingenuity in getting what he wanted. But he was far too short-sighted
+ever to show the slightest gratitude for what he had obtained. Greedy of
+piastres, he coveted still more eagerly such small glittering articles
+as one cannot keep covered--gold scarf-pins, rings, sleeve-links, or
+nickel cigar-lighters; and when he saw a gold chain his face would
+light up with a gleam of pleasure.
+
+"The following summer was the hardest time of my life. An epidemic of
+cholera had broken out in Lower Egypt. I was running about the town all
+day long in a scorching atmosphere. Cairo summers are overpowering to
+Europeans. We were going through the hottest weeks I had ever known. I
+heard one day that Selim, brought before the native court of Cairo, had
+been sentenced to death. He had murdered the daughter of some fellaheen,
+a little girl nine years old, in order to rob her of her ear-rings, and
+had thrown her into a cistern. The rings, stained with blood, had been
+found under a big stone in the Valley of the Kings. They were the crude
+jewels which the Nubian nomads hammer out of shillings or two-franc
+pieces, I was told that Selim would certainly be hanged, because the
+little girl's mother refused the tendered blood-money. Now, the Khedive
+does not enjoy the prerogative of mercy, and the murderer, according to
+Moslem law, can redeem his life only if the parents of the victim
+consent to receive from him a sum of money as compensation. I was too
+busy to give thought to the matter. I could readily imagine that Selim,
+cunning but thoughtless, caressing yet unfeeling, had played with the
+little girl, torn off her ear-rings, killed her, and hidden her body.
+The affair soon passed out of my mind. The epidemic was spreading from
+Old Cairo to the European quarters. I was visiting from thirty to forty
+sick persons daily, practising venous injections in every case. I was
+suffering from liver trouble, anæmia was playing havoc with me, and I
+was dropping with fatigue. In order to husband my strength, I took a
+little rest at noon. I was accustomed, after luncheon, to lie down in
+the inner courtyard of my house, and there for an hour I bathed myself
+in the African shade, as dense and cool as water. One day, as I was
+lying there on a divan in my courtyard, just as I was lighting a
+cigarette, I saw Selim approaching. With his beautiful bronze arm he
+lifted the door-curtain, and came towards me in his blue robe. He did
+not speak, but smiled with his shy and innocent smile, and the deep red
+of his lips disclosed his dazzling teeth. His eyes, beneath the blue
+shadow of his eyelashes, shone with covetousness while gazing at my
+watch which lay on the table.
+
+"I thought he had escaped. And this surprised me, not because captives
+are strictly watched in Oriental prisons, where men, women, horses and
+dogs are herded in imperfectly closed courtyards, and guarded by a
+soldier armed with a stick. But Moslems are never tempted to flee from
+their fate. Selim knelt down with an appealing grace, and approached
+his lips to my hand, to kiss it according to ancient custom. I was not
+asleep, and I had proof of it. I also had proof that the apparition had
+been before me only for a short time. When Selim had vanished I noticed
+that my cigarette, which was alight, was not yet tipped with ash."
+
+"Was he dead when you saw him?" asked Nanteuil.
+
+"Not a bit of it," replied the doctor, "I heard a few days later that
+Selim, in his jail, wove little baskets, or played for hours at a time
+with a chaplet of glass balls, and that he would smilingly beg a piastre
+of European visitors, who were surprised by the caressing softness of
+his eyes. Moslem justice is slow. He was hanged six months later. No
+one, not even he himself, was greatly concerned about it. I was in
+Europe at the time."
+
+"And since then he has never reappeared?"
+
+"Never."
+
+Nanteuil looked at him, disappointed.
+
+"I thought he had come when he was dead. But since he was in prison you
+certainly could not have seen him in your house. You only thought you
+saw him."
+
+The physician, understanding what was in Félicie's mind, quickly replied:
+
+"My dear little Nanteuil, believe what I tell you. The phantoms of the
+dead have no more reality than the phantoms of the living."
+
+Without attending to what he was saying, she asked him if it was really
+because he suffered from his liver that he had a vision. He replied that
+he believed that the bad state of his digestive organs, general fatigue,
+and a tendency to congestion, had all predisposed him to behold an
+apparition.
+
+"There was; I believe," he added, "a more immediate cause. Stretched
+out on my divan, my head was very low. I raised it to light a cigarette,
+and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly
+favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with
+one's head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds.
+That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster and a fat
+pillow."
+
+She began to laugh.
+
+"As mamma does--majestically!"
+
+Then, flitting off to another idea:
+
+"Tell me; Socrates, how comes it that you saw this sordid individual
+rather than another? You had hired a donkey from him, and you were no
+longer thinking of him. And yet he came. Say what you like, it's queer."
+
+"You ask me why it was he rather than another? It would be very hard for
+me to tell you. Our visions, bound up with our innermost thoughts,
+often present their images to us; sometimes there is no connection
+between them, and they show us an unexpected figure."
+
+He once more exhorted her not to allow herself to be frightened by
+phantoms.
+
+"The dead do not return. When one of them appears to you, rest assured
+that what you see is a thing imagined by your brain."
+
+"Can you," she inquired; "guarantee that there is nothing after death?"
+
+"My child, there is nothing after death that could frighten you."
+
+She rose, picked up her little bag and her part, and held out her hand
+to the doctor, saying:
+
+"As for you, you don't believe in anything, do you, old Socrates?"
+
+He detained her for a moment in the waiting-room, warned her to take
+good care of herself, to lead a quiet, restful life, and to take
+sufficient rest.
+
+"Do you suppose that is easy in our profession? To-morrow I have a
+rehearsal in the green-room, and one on the stage, and I have to try on
+a gown, while to-night I am acting. For more than a year now I've been
+leading that sort of life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Under the great void reserved by the height of the roof for the upward
+flight of prayers the motley crowd of human beings was huddled together
+like a flock of sheep.
+
+They were all there, at the foot of the catafalque surrounded by lights
+and covered with flowers, Durville, old Maury, Delage, Vicar, Destrée,
+Léon Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay,
+the manager. They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen
+Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, Louise Dalle,
+Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some
+of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping. All of them
+brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their
+heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning.
+Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans who
+gain their living by the theatre, and a crowd of curious onlookers
+filled the nave.
+
+The choristers were uttering the mournful cries of the _Kyrie eleison_;
+the priest kissed the altar; turned towards the people and said:
+
+_"Dominus vobiscum."_
+
+Romilly; taking in the crowd at a glance, remarked
+
+"Chevalier has a full house."
+
+"Just look at that Louise Dalle," said Fagette. "To look as though she's
+in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!"
+
+A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr.
+Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his
+moral homilies.
+
+"Observe," he said, "that they are lighting, on the altar and about the
+coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on
+billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of
+virgin wax to the Lord. The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at
+all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions.
+This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan's."
+
+The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting
+in a low voice:
+
+_"Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non
+contrisemimi, sicut et cæteri qui spem non habent."_
+
+"Who is taking the part of Florentin?" inquired Durville of Romilly.
+
+"Regnard: he'll be no worse in it than Chevalier."
+
+Pradel plucked Trublet by the sleeve, and said:
+
+"Dr. Socrates, I beg you to tell me whether as a scientific man, as a
+physiologist, you see any serious objections to the immortality of the
+soul?"
+
+He asked the question as a busy and practical man in need of personal
+information.
+
+"You are doubtless aware, my dear friend," replied Trublet, "what
+Cyrano's bird said on this very subject. One day Cyrano de Bergerac
+heard two birds conversing in a tree. One of them said, 'The souls of
+birds are immortal,' 'There can be no doubt of it,' replied the other.
+'But it is inconceivable that beings who possess neither bill nor
+feathers, who have no wings and walk on two legs, should believe that
+they, like the birds, have an immortal soul.'"
+
+"All the same," said Pradel, "when I hear the organ, I am chock-full of
+religious ideas."
+
+_"Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine."_
+
+The celebrated author of _La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812_ appeared in the
+church, and no sooner had he done so than he was everywhere at one and
+the same moment--in the nave, under the porch, and in the choir. Like
+the _Diable boiteux_ he must, bestriding his crutch, have soared above
+the heads of the congregation, to pass as he did in the twinkling of an
+eye from Morlot, the deputy, who, being a freethinker, had remained in
+the parvis, to Marie-Claire kneeling at the foot of the catafalque.
+
+At one and at the same moment he whispered into the ears of all a few
+nimble phrases:
+
+"Pradel, can you imagine this fellow going and chucking his part, an
+excellent part, and running off to kill himself? A pumpkin-headed fool!
+Blows out his brains just two days before the first night. Compels us to
+replace him and sets us back a week. What an imbecile! A rotten bad egg.
+But we must do him justice; he could jump, and jump well, the animal.
+Well, my dear Romilly, we rehearse the new man to-day at two o'clock.
+See to it that Regnard has the script of his part, and that he knows how
+to climb on to the roof. Let us hope he won't kick the bucket on our
+hands like Chevalier. What if he, too, were to commit suicide! You
+needn't laugh. There's an evil spell on certain parts. Thus, in my
+_Marino Falieri_, the gondolier Sandro breaks his arm at the dress
+rehearsal. I am given another Sandro. He sprains his ankle on the first
+night. I am given a third, he contracts typhoid fever. My little
+Nanteuil, I'll entrust you with a magnificent rôle to create when you get
+to the Français. But I have sworn by the great gods that I'll never
+again have a single play performed in this theatre."
+
+And immediately, under the little door which shuts off the choir on the
+right hand side of the altar, showing his friends Racine's epitaph,
+which is let into the wall, like a Parisian thoroughly conversant with
+the antiquities of his city, he recalled the history of this stone, he
+told them how the poet had been buried in accordance with his desire at
+Port-Royal-des-Champs, at the foot of Monsieur Hamon's grave, and that,
+after the destruction of the abbey and the violation of the tombs, the
+body of Messire Jean Racine, the King's secretary, Groom of the Chamber,
+had been transferred, all unhonoured; to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont. And he
+told how the tombstone, bearing the inscription composed for Boileau,
+beneath the knight's crest and the shield with its swan argent, and done
+into Latin by Monsieur Dodart, had served as a flagstone in the choir of
+the little church of Magny-Lessart; where it had been discovered in
+1808.
+
+"There it is," he added. "It was broken in six pieces and the name of
+Racine was effaced by the shoes of the peasants. The fragments were
+pieced together and the missing letters carved anew."
+
+On this subject he expatiated with his customary vivacity and
+diffusiveness, drawing from his prodigious memory a multitude of curious
+facts and amusing anecdotes, breathing life into history and endowing
+archæology with a living interest. His admiration and his wrath burst
+forth in swift and violent alternation in the solemnity of the church,
+and amid the pomp of the ceremony.
+
+"I would give something to know, for instance, who were the stupid
+bunglers who set this stone in the wall. _Hic jacet nobilis vir Johannes
+Racine._ It is not true! They make honest Boileau's epitaph lie. The
+body of Racine is not in this spot. It was laid to rest in the third
+chapel on the left, as you enter. What idiots!" Then, suddenly calm, he
+pointed to Pascal's tombstone.
+
+"That came here from the museum of the Petits-Augustins. No praise can
+be too great for Lenoir, who, in the days of the Revolution, collected
+and preserved."
+
+Thereupon, he improvised a second lecture on lapidary archæology, even
+more brilliant than the first, transformed the history of Pascal's life
+into a terrible yet amusing drama, and vanished. In all, he had remained
+in the church for the space of ten minutes.
+
+Over those heads full of worldly cares and profane desires the _Dies
+iræ_ rumbled like a storm:
+
+  _"Mors stupebit et natura,
+  Quum resurget creatura
+  Judicanti responsura."_
+
+"Tell me, Dutil, how could that little Nanteuil, who is pretty and
+intelligent, get herself mixed up with a dirty mummer like Chevalier?"
+
+"Your ignorance of the feminine heart surprises me."
+
+"Herschell was prettier when she was a brunette."
+
+  _"Qui Mariam absolvisti
+  Et latronem exaudisti
+  Mihi quoque spem dedisti."_
+
+"I must be off to lunch."
+
+"Do you know anyone who knows the Minister?"
+
+"Durville is a has-been. He blows like a grampus."
+
+"Put me in a little paragraph about Marie Falempin. I can tell you she
+was simply delicious in _Les Trois Magots_."
+
+  _"Inter oves locum presta
+  Et ab hædis me sequestra,
+  Statuens in parte dextra."_
+
+"So then, it is for Nanteuil's sake that he blew out his brains? A
+little ninny who isn't worth spanking!"
+
+The celebrant poured the wine and the water into the chance, saying:
+
+_"Deus qui humanæ substantiæ dignitatem mirabiliter condidisu...."_
+
+"Is it really true, doctor, that he killed himself because Nanteuil
+wouldn't have any more to do with him?"
+
+"He killed himself," replied Trublet, "because she loved another. The
+obsession of genetic images frequently determines mania and
+melancholia."
+
+"You don't understand second-rate actors, Dr. Socrates," said Pradel. "He
+killed himself to cause a sensation, and for no other reason."
+
+"It's not only second-rate actors," said Constantin Marc, "who suffer
+from an uncontrollable desire to attract attention to themselves at
+whatever cost. Last year, in the place where I live, Saint-Bartholomé,
+while a threshing-machine was at work, a thirteen-year-old boy shoved
+his arm into the gear; it was crushed up to the shoulder. The surgeon
+who amputated it asked him, as he was dressing the stump, why he
+mutilated himself like that. The boy confessed that it was to draw
+attention to himself."
+
+Meanwhile, Nanteuil, with dry eyes and pursed lips, had fixed her eyes
+upon the black cloth with which the catafalque was covered, and was
+impatiently waiting until enough holy water, candles and Latin prayers
+should be bestowed upon the dead man for him to depart in peace. She
+had seen him again the night before, and she thought he had returned
+because the priests had not yet bidden him to rest in peace. Then,
+reflecting that one day she, too, would die, and would, like him, be
+laid in a coffin, beneath a black pall, she shuddered with horror and
+closed her eyes. The idea of life was so strong within her that she
+pictured death as a hideous life. Afraid of death, she prayed for a long
+life. Kneeling, with bowed head, the voluptuous ashen cloud of her
+buoyant hair falling over her forehead, she, a profane penitent, was
+reading in her prayer-book words which reassured her, although she did
+not understand them.
+
+"Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful
+dead from the pains of hell and from the depths of the bottomless pit.
+Deliver them from the lion's jaws. Let them not be plunged into hell,
+and let them not fall into the outer darkness, but suffer that St.
+Michael, the Prince of Angels, lead them to the holy light promised by
+Thee to Abraham and to his posterity."
+
+At the Elevation of the Host the congregation, permeated by a vague
+impression that the mystery was becoming more sacred, ceased its private
+conversations, and assumed a certain appearance of reverent devotion.
+And as the organ fell silent all heads were bowed at the tinkling of a
+little bell which was shaken by a child. Then, after the last Gospel,
+when, the service being over, the priest, attended by his acolytes,
+approached the catafalque to the chanting of the _Libera_, a sense of
+relief was experienced by the crowd, and they began to jostle one
+another a little in order to file past the coffin. The women, whose
+piety, grief and contrition were contingent upon their immobility and
+their kneeling posture, were at once recalled to their customary frame
+of mind by the movement and the encounters of the procession. They
+exchanged amongst themselves and with the men remarks relating to their
+profession.
+
+"Do you know," said Ellen Midi to Falempin, "that Nanteuil is going to
+join the Comédie-Française?"
+
+"It's not possible!"
+
+"The contract is signed."
+
+"How did she manage it?"
+
+"Not by her acting, you may be sure," replied Ellen, who proceeded to
+relate a highly scandalous story.
+
+"Take care," said Falempin, "she is just behind you."
+
+"Yes, I see her! She's got a cheek of her own to show herself here,
+don't you think?"
+
+Marie-Claire whispered an extraordinary piece of news into Durville's
+ear:
+
+"They say he committed suicide. Well, there's not a word of truth in it
+He didn't commit suicide at all. And the proof of it is that he is being
+buried with the rites of the Church."
+
+"What then?" inquired Durville.
+
+"Monsieur de Ligny surprised him with Nanteuil and killed him."
+
+"Come, come!"
+
+"I can assure you that I am accurately informed."
+
+The conversations were becoming animated and familiar.
+
+"So you are here, you wicked old sinner!"
+
+"The box-office receipts are falling off already."
+
+"Stella has succeeded in getting herself proposed by seventeen Deputies,
+nine of whom are members of the Budget Commission."
+
+"Yet I told Herschell, 'That little Bocquet fellow isn't the man for you.
+What you need is a man of standing.'"
+
+When the bier, borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west
+door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women
+and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis,
+a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces of celebrities;
+the little factory girls from the neighbouring workshops, standing in
+couples with arms round each other's waists, contemplated the
+actresses' dresses. And standing against the porch on their aching feet,
+a couple of tramps, accustomed to living under the open sky, whether
+mild or sullen, slowly shifted their dejected gaze, while a college lad
+gazed with rapture at the fiery tresses which coiled like flames on the
+nape of Fagette's neck.
+
+She had stopped on the topmost step in front of the doors, and was
+chatting with Constantin Marc and a few journalists:
+
+"...Monsieur de Ligny? He danced attendance upon me long before he knew
+Nanteuil. He used to gaze upon me by the hour, with eager eyes, without
+daring to speak a word to me. I received him willingly enough, for his
+behaviour was perfect. It is only fair to say that his manners are
+excellent. He was as reserved as a man could be. At last, one day, he
+declared that he was madly in love with me. I told him that as he was
+speaking to me seriously I would do the same; that I was truly sorry to
+see him in such a state; that every time such a thing happened I was
+greatly upset by it; that I was a woman of standing, I had settled my
+life, and could do nothing for him. He was desperate. He informed me
+that he was leaving for Constantinople, that he would never return. He
+couldn't make up his mind either to remain or to go away. He fell ill.
+Nanteuil, who thought I loved him and wanted to keep him, did all in
+her power to get him away from me. She flung herself at his head in the
+craziest fashion, I found her sometimes a trifle ridiculous, but, as you
+may imagine, I did not place any obstacle in her path. For his part,
+Monsieur de Ligny, with the object of inspiring me with regret, with
+vexation, or what not, perhaps in the hope of making me jealous,
+responded very visibly to Nanteuil's advances. And that is how they came
+to be together. I was delighted. Nanteuil and I are the best of
+friends."
+
+Madame Doulce, hedged in on either side by the onlookers, came slowly
+down the steps, indulging herself in the illusion that the crowd was
+whispering, "That's Doulce!"
+
+She seized Nanteuil as she was passing, pressed her to her bosom, and
+with a beautiful gesture of Christian charity enveloped her in her
+mantle, saying through her sobs:
+
+"Try to pray, my child, and accept this medal. It has been blessed by
+the Pope. A Dominican Father gave it to me."
+
+Madame Nanteuil, who was a little out of breath, but was growing young
+again since she had renewed her experience of love, was the last to come
+out. Durville pressed her hand.
+
+"Poor Chevalier!" he murmured.
+
+"His was not a bad character," answered Madame Nanteuil, "but he showed
+a lack of tact. A man of the world does not commit suicide in such a
+manner. Poor boy, he had no breeding."
+
+The hearse began its journey in the colossal shadow of the Panthéon, and
+proceeded down the Rue Soufflet, which is lined on both sides with
+booksellers' shops. Chevalier's fellow-players, the employés of the
+theatre, the director, Dr. Socrates, Constantin Marc, a few journalists
+and a few inquisitive onlookers followed. The clergy and the actresses
+took their seats in the mourning coaches. Nanteuil, disregarding Madame
+Doulce's advice, followed with Fagette, in a hired coupé.
+
+The weather was fine. Behind the hearse the mourners were conversing in
+familiar fashion.
+
+"The cemetery is the devil of a way!"
+
+"Montparnasse? Half an hour at the outside."
+
+"Do you know Nanteuil is engaged at the Comédie-Française?"
+
+"Do we rehearse to-day?" Constantin Marc inquired of Romilly.
+
+"To be sure we do, at three o'clock, in the green-room. We shall
+rehearse till five. I am playing to-night; I am playing to-morrow; on
+Sunday I play both afternoon and evening. Work is never over for us
+actors; one is always beginning over again, always putting one's
+shoulder to the wheel."
+
+Adolphe Meunier, the poet, laying his hand on his shoulder said:
+
+"Everything going well, Romilly?"
+
+"How are you getting on yourself, Meunier? Always rolling the rock of
+Sisyphus. That would be nothing, but success does not depend on us
+alone. If the play is bad and falls flat, all that we have put into it,
+our work, our talent, a bit of our own life, collapses with it. And the
+number of 'frosts' I've seen! How often the play has fallen under me
+like an old hack, and has chucked me into the gutter! Ah, if one were
+punished only for one's own sins!"
+
+"My dear Romilly," replied Meunier sharply, "do you imagine that the
+fate of dramatic authors like myself does not depend as much upon the
+actors as upon ourselves? Do you think it never happens that actors, by
+their carelessness or clumsiness, ruin a work which was meant to reach
+the heights? And do not we also, like Cæsar's legionary, become seized
+with dismay and anguish at the thought that our fate is not assured by
+our own valour, but that it depends on those who fight beside us?"
+
+"Such is life," observed Constantin Marc. "In every undertaking,
+everywhere and always, we pay for the faults of others."
+
+"That is only too true," resumed Meunier, who had just seen his lyric
+drama, _Pandolphe et Clarimonde_, come hopelessly to grief. "But the
+iniquity of it disgusts us."
+
+"It should not disgust us in the least," replied Constantin Marc. "There
+is a sacred law which governs the world, which we are forced to obey,
+which we are proud to worship. It is injustice, holy injustice, august
+injustice. It is everywhere blessed under the name of happiness,
+fortune, genius and grace. It is a weakness not to acknowledge it and to
+venerate it under its true name."
+
+"That's rather weird, what you have just said!" remarked the gentle
+Meunier.
+
+"Think it over," resumed Constantin Marc. "You, too, belong yourself to
+the party of injustice, for you are striving for distinction, and you
+very reasonably want to throttle your competitors, a natural, unjust and
+legitimate desire. Do you know of anything more stupid or more odious
+than the sort of people we have seen demanding justice? Public opinion,
+which is not, however, remarkable for its intelligence, and common
+sense, which nevertheless is not a superior sense, have felt that they
+constituted the precise contrary of nature, society and life."
+
+"Quite so," said Meunier, "but justice----"
+
+"Justice is nothing but the dream of a few simpletons. Injustice is the
+thought of God Himself. The doctrine of original sin would alone
+suffice to make me a Christian, while the doctrine of grace embodies all
+truths divine and human."
+
+"Then are you a believer?" asked Romilly respectfully.
+
+"No, but I should like to be. I regard faith as the most precious
+possession which a man can enjoy in this world. At Saint-Bartholomé, I
+go to Mass every Sunday and feast day, and I have never once listened to
+the exposition of the Gospel by the _curé_ without saying to myself: 'I
+would give all I possess, my house, my acres, my woods, to be as stupid
+as that animal there.'"
+
+Michel, the young painter with the mystic's beard, was saying to Roget,
+the scene painter:
+
+"That poor Chevalier was a man with ideas. But they were not all good
+ones. One evening, he walked into the _brasserie_ radiant and
+transfigured, sat himself beside us, and twirling his old felt hat
+between his long red fingers, he cried: 'I have discovered the true
+manner of acting tragedy. Hitherto no one has realized how to act
+tragedy, no one, you understand!' And he told us what his discovery was.
+'I've just come from the Chamber. They made me climb up to the
+amphitheatre. I could see the Deputies swarming like black insects at
+the bottom of a pit. Suddenly a stumpy little man mounted the tribune.
+He looked as if he were carrying a sack of coals on his back. He threw
+out his arms and clenched his fists. By Jove, he was comical! He had a
+Southern accent, and his delivery was full of defects. He spoke of the
+workers, of the proletariat, of social justice. It was magnificent; his
+voice, his gestures gripped one's very bowels; the applause nearly
+brought the house down. I said to myself "What he is doing, I'll do on
+the stage, and I'll do it better. I, a comic actor, will play tragedy.
+Great tragedy parts, if they are to produce their true effect, ought to
+be played by a comedian, but he must have a soul."' The poor fellow
+actually thought that he had imagined a new form of art. 'You'll see,'
+he said."
+
+At the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, a journalist came up to
+Meunier, and asked him:
+
+"Is it true that Robert de Ligny was at one time madly in love with
+Fagette?"
+
+"If he's in love with her, he hasn't been so long. Only a fortnight ago
+he asked me, in the theatre, 'Who is that little fair-haired woman?' and
+he pointed to Fagette."
+
+"I cannot understand," said the chronicler of an evening paper to a
+chronicler of a morning paper, "what can be the origin of our mania for
+calumniating humanity. I am amazed, on the other hand, by the number of
+decent people I come across. It is enough to make one incline to the
+belief that men are ashamed of the good they do, and that they conceal
+themselves when performing acts of devotion and generosity. Don't you
+think that is so?"
+
+"As far as I am concerned," replied the chronicler of the morning paper,
+"every time I have opened a door by mistake--I mean this both literally
+and metaphorically--I have always come across some unsuspected baseness.
+Were society suddenly turned inside out like a glove, so that one could
+see the inside, we should all faint away with horror and disgust."
+
+"Some time ago," said Roger to the painter Michel, "I used to know
+Chevalier's uncle on the Butte de Montmartre. He was a photographer who
+dressed like an astrologer. A crazy old fellow, always sending one
+customer the portrait of another. The customers used to complain. But
+not all of them. There were even some who thought the portraits were a
+good likeness."
+
+"What has become of him?"
+
+"He went bankrupt and hanged himself."
+
+In the Boulevard Saint-Michel Pradel, who was walking beside Trublet,
+was still profiting by the opportunity of obtaining information as to
+the immortality of the soul and the fate of man after death. He obtained
+nothing that seemed to him sufficiently positive and repeated:
+
+"I should like to know."
+
+To which Dr. Socrates replied:
+
+"Men were not made to know; men were not made to understand. They do not
+possess the necessary faculties. A man's brain is larger and richer in
+convolutions than that of a gorilla, but there is no essential
+difference between the two. Our highest thoughts and our most
+comprehensive systems will never be anything more than the magnificent
+extension of the ideas contained in the head of a monkey. We know more
+about the world than the dog does, and this flatters and entertains us;
+but it is very little in itself, and our illusions increase with our
+knowledge."
+
+But Pradel was not listening. He was mentally rehearsing the speech
+which he had to deliver at Chevalier's grave.
+
+When the funeral procession turned towards the shabby grass-plots which
+overflow the Avenue de l'Observatoire, the tram-cars, out of respect for
+the dead, made way for it.
+
+Trublet remarked upon this.
+
+"Men," he said, "respect death, since they rightly believe that, if it
+is respectable to die, every one is assured of being respectable in
+that, at least."
+
+The actors were excitedly discussing Chevalier's death. Durville,
+mysteriously, and in a deep voice, disclosed the tragedy:
+
+"It is not a case of suicide. It is a crime of passion. Monsieur de
+Ligny surprised Chevalier with Nanteuil. He fired seven revolver shots
+at him. Two bullets struck our unfortunate comrade in the head and the
+chest, four went wide, and the fifth grazed Nanteuil below the left
+breast."
+
+"Is Nanteuil wounded?"
+
+"Only slightly."
+
+"Will Monsieur de Ligny be arrested?"
+
+"The affair is to be hushed up, and rightly so. I have, however, the best
+authority for what I say."
+
+In the carriages, too, the actresses were engaged in spreading various
+reports. Some felt sure it was a case of murder; others, one of suicide.
+
+"He shot himself in the chest with a revolver," asserted Falempin. "But
+he only succeeded in wounding himself. The doctor said that if he had
+been attended to in time he might have been saved. But they left him
+lying on the floor, bathed in blood."
+
+And Madame Doulce said to Ellen Midi:
+
+"It has often been my fate to stand beside a deathbed. I always go down
+on my knees and pray. I at once feel myself invaded by a heavenly
+serenity."
+
+"You are indeed fortunate!" replied Ellen Midi.
+
+At the end of the Rue Campagne-Première, on the wide grey boulevards,
+they became conscious of the length of the road which they had covered,
+and the melancholy nature of the journey. They felt that while following
+the coffin they had crossed the confines of life, and were already in
+the country of the dead. On their right stretched the yards of the
+marble-workers, the florists' shops which supplied wreaths for funerals,
+displays of potted flowers, and the economical furniture of tombs, zinc
+flower-stands, wreaths of immortelles in cement, and guardian angels in
+plaster. On their left, they could see behind the low wall of the
+cemetery the white crosses rising among the bare tops of the lime-trees,
+and everywhere, in the wan dust, they breathed death, commonplace,
+uniform deaths under the administration of City and State, and poorly
+embellished by the pious hands of relations.
+
+They passed between two massive pillars of stone surmounted by winged
+hour-glasses. The hearse advanced slowly on the gravel which creaked in
+the silence. It seemed, amid the homes of the dead, to be twice as tall
+as before. The mourners read the famous names on some of the tombs, or
+gazed at the statue of a young girl, seated, book in hand. Old Maury
+deciphered, in the inscriptions, the age of the deceased. Short lives,
+and even more lives of average duration, distressed him as being of ill
+omen. But, when he encountered those of the dead who were notable for
+the length of their years, he joyfully drew from them the hope and
+probability of a long lease of life.
+
+The hearse stopped in the middle of a side alley. The clergy and the
+women stepped out of the coaches. Delage received in his arms, from the
+top of the carriage steps, the worthy Madame Ravaud, who was getting a
+little ponderous, and of a sudden, half in jest, half in earnest, he
+made certain proposals to her. She was no longer young, having been on
+the stage for half a century. Delage, with his twenty-five years, looked
+upon her as prodigiously old. Yet, as he whispered into her ear, he felt
+excited, infatuated, he became sincere, he really desired her, out of
+perverse curiosity, because he wanted to do something extraordinary, and
+was certain that he would be able to do it, perhaps because of his
+professional instinct as a handsome youth, and, lastly, because, in the
+first place having asked for what he did not want, he began to want what
+he had asked for. Madame Ravaud, indignant but flattered, made good her
+escape.
+
+The coffin was carried along a narrow path bordered with dwarf
+cypresses, amid a murmuring of prayers:
+
+_"In paradisum deducant te Angeli, in tuo adventu susciptant te Martyres
+et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem, Chorus Angelorum te
+suscipiat et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere, æternam habeas requiem."_
+
+Soon there was no longer any visible path. It was necessary, in
+following the quickly vanishing coffin, the priests and the choristers,
+to scatter, striding over the recumbent tombstones, and slipping between
+the broken columns and upright slabs. They lost the coffin and found it
+again. Nanteuil evinced a certain eagerness in her pursuit of it,
+anxious and abrupt, her prayer-book in her hand, freeing her skirt as it
+caught on the railings, and brushing past the withered wreaths which
+left the heads of immortelles adhering to her gown. Finally, the first
+to reach the graveside smelt the acrid odour of the freshly turned soil,
+and from the heights of the neighbouring flagstones saw the grave into
+which the coffin was being lowered.
+
+The actors had contributed liberally to the expenses of the funeral;
+they had clubbed together to buy for their comrade as much earth as he
+needed, two metres granted for five years. Romilly, on behalf of the
+actors of the Odéon, had paid the cemetery board 300 francs--to be
+exact, 301 fr. 80 centimes. He had even made plans for a monument, a
+broken stele with comedy masks suspended upon it. But no decision had
+been come to on this point.
+
+The celebrant blessed the open grave. And the priest and the boy
+choristers murmured the responses:
+
+"Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine."
+
+_"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."_
+
+_"Requiescat in pace."_
+
+_"Amen."_
+
+_"Anima ejus et animæ omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam
+Dei, requiescant in pace."_
+
+_"Amen."_
+
+_"De profundis...."_
+
+Each one of those present came forward to sprinkle holy water on the
+coffin. Nanteuil stood watching it all, the prayers, the spadefuls of
+earth, the sprinkling; then, kneeling apart on the corner of a tomb, she
+fervently recited "Our Father who art in heaven...."
+
+Pradel spoke at the graveside. He refrained from making a speech. But
+the Théâtre de l'Odéon could not allow a young artist beloved of all to
+depart without a word of farewell.
+
+"I shall speak therefore, in the name of the great and true-hearted
+dramatic family, the words that are in every bosom."
+
+Grouped about the speaker in studied attitudes, the actors listened with
+profound knowledge. They listened actively, with their ears, lips, eyes,
+arms, and legs. Each listened in his own manner, with nobility,
+simplicity, grief or rebelliousness, according to the parts which the
+actor was accustomed to play.
+
+No, the director of the theatre would not suffer the valiant actor, who,
+in the course of his only too brief career, had shown more than
+promise, to depart without a word of farewell.
+
+"Chevalier, impetuous, uneven, restless, imparted to his creations an
+individual character, a distinctive physiognomy. We saw him a very few
+days ago--a few hours ago, I might say--bring an episodical character
+into powerful relief. The author of the play was struck by the
+performance. Chevalier was on the verge of success. The sacred flame was
+his. There are those who have asked, what was the cause of so cruel an
+end? Let us not seek for that cause. Chevalier died of his art; he died
+of dramatic fever. He died consumed by the flame which is slowly
+consuming all of us. Alas, the stage, of which the public sees only the
+smiles, and the tears, as sweet as the smiles, is a jealous master which
+demands of its servants an absolute devotion and the most painful
+sacrifices, and, at times, claims its victims. In the name of all your
+comrades, farewell, Chevalier, farewell!"
+
+The handkerchiefs were at work, wiping away the mourners' tears. The
+actors were weeping with all sincerity; they were weeping for
+themselves.
+
+After they had slipped away, Dr. Trublet, left alone in the cemetery
+with Constantin Marc, took in the multitude of graves with a glance.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, "one of Auguste Comte's reflections:
+'Humanity is composed of the dead and the living. The dead are by far
+the more numerous.' Assuredly, the dead are by far the more numerous. By
+the multitudinous numbers and the magnitude of their work, they are more
+powerful. It's they who rule; we obey them. Our masters lie beneath
+these stones. Here is the lawgiver who made the law to which I submit
+to-day; the architect who built my house, the poet who created the
+illusions which still disturb us; the orator who swayed us before our
+birth. Here are all the artisans of our knowledge, true or false, of our
+wisdom and of our follies. There they lie, the inexorable leaders, whom
+we dare not disobey. In them dwells strength, continuity, and duration.
+What does a generation of living folk amount to, in comparison with the
+numberless generations of the dead? What is our will of a day before the
+will of a thousand centuries? Can we rebel against them? Why, we have
+not even time to disobey them!"
+
+"At last you are coming to the point, Dr. Socrates!" said Constantin
+Marc. "You renounce progress, the new justice, the peace of the world,
+freedom of thought; you submit to tradition. You consent to the ancient
+error, the good old-fashioned ignorance, the venerable iniquity of our
+forbears. You withdraw into the French tradition, you submit to ancient
+custom, to the authority of our ancestors."
+
+"Whence do you obtain custom and tradition?" asked Trablet. "Whence do
+you receive authority? There are irreconcilable traditions, diverse
+customs; and opposed authorities. The dead do not impose any one will
+upon us. They subject us to contradictory wills. The opinions of the
+past which weigh upon us are uncertain and confused. In crushing us they
+destroy one another. All these dead have lived, like ourselves, in the
+midst of disorder and contradiction. Each in his time, in his own
+fashion, in hatred or in love, has dreamed the dream of life. Let us in
+our turn dream this dream with kindness and joy, if it be possible, and
+let us go to lunch. I am taking you to a little tavern in the Rue Vavin,
+kept by Clémence, who cooks only one dish, but a marvellous one at that,
+the Castelnaudary _cassoulet_, not to be confused with the _cassoulet_
+prepared in the Carcassonne fashion, which is merely a leg of mutton
+with haricot beans. The _cassoulet_ of Castelnaudary comprises pickled
+goose legs, haricot beans that have been previously bleached, bacon, and
+a small sausage. To be good, it must be cooked for a long time over a
+slow fire. Clémence's _cassoulet_ has been cooking for twenty years.
+From time to time she puts in the saucepan, now a little bit of goose or
+bacon, now a sausage or some haricots, but it is always the same
+_cassoulet_. The stock remains, and this ancient and precious stock
+gives it the flavour which, in the pictures of the old Venetian masters,
+one finds in the amber-coloured flesh of the women. Come, I want you to
+taste Clémence's _cassoulet_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Having said her prayer, Nanteuil, without waiting to hear Pradel's
+speech, jumped into a carriage in order to join Robert de Ligny, who was
+waiting for her in front of the Montparnasse railway station. Amid the
+throng of passers-by they shook hands, gazing at one another without a
+word. More than ever did they feel that they were bound together. Robert
+loved her.
+
+He loved her without knowing it. She was for him, or so he believed,
+merely one delight in the infinite series of possible delights. But
+delight had assumed for him the form of Félicie, and, had he reflected
+more deeply upon the innumerable women whom he promised himself in the
+vast remainder of his newly begun life, he would have recognized that
+now they were all Félicies. He might at least have realized that,
+without having any intention of being faithful to her, he did not dream
+of being unfaithful, and that since she had given herself to him he had
+not desired any other woman. But he did not realize it.
+
+On this occasion, however, standing in the bustling commonplace square,
+on seeing her no longer in the voluptuous shadow of night, nor under the
+caressing glimmer of the alcove which gave her naked form the delicious
+vagueness of a Milky Way, but in a harsh, diffused daylight, by the
+circumstantial illumination of a sunlight devoid of splendour and
+without shadows, which revealed beneath her veil her eyelids that were
+seared with tears, her pearly cheeks and roughened lips, he realized
+that he felt for this woman's flesh a profound and mysterious
+inclination.
+
+He did not question her. They exchanged only tender trivial phrases.
+And, as she was very hungry, he took her to lunch at a well-known
+_cabaret_ whose name shone in letters of gold on one of the old houses
+in the square. They had their meal served in the winter-garden, whose
+rockery, fountain, and solitary tree were multiplied by mirrors framed
+in a green trellis. When seated at the table, consulting the bill of
+fare, they conversed with less restraint than heretofore. He told her
+that the emotions and worries of the past three days had unstrung his
+nerves, but he no longer thought about it, and it would be absurd to
+worry about the matter any further. She spoke to him of her health,
+complaining that she could not sleep, save for a restless slumber full
+of dreams. But she did not tell him what she saw in those dreams, and
+she avoided speaking of the dead man. He asked her if she had not spent
+a tiring morning, and why she had gone to the cemetery, a useless
+proceeding.
+
+Incapable of explaining to him the depths of her soul, submissive to
+rites and propitiatory ceremonies and incantations, she shook her head
+as if to say:
+
+"Had to."
+
+While those lunching at the adjoining tables were finishing their meal,
+they talked for a long time, both in subdued tones, while waiting to be
+served.
+
+Robert had promised himself, had sworn indeed never to reproach Félicie
+for having had Chevalier for her lover, or even to ask her a single
+question in this connection. And yet, moved by some obscure resentment,
+by an ebullition of ill-temper or natural curiosity, and also because he
+loved her too deeply to control himself, he said to her, with bitterness
+in his voice:
+
+"You were on intimate terms with him, formerly."
+
+She was silent, and did not deny the fact. Not that she felt that it was
+henceforth useless to lie. On the contrary, she was in the habit of
+denying the obvious truth, and she had, of course, too much knowledge of
+men to be ignorant of the fact that, when in love, there is no lie,
+however clumsy, which they cannot believe if they wish to do so. But on
+this occasion, contrary to her nature and habit, she refrained from
+lying. She was afraid of offending the dead. She imagined that in
+denying him she would be doing him a wrong, depriving him of his share,
+angering him. She held her peace, fearing to see him come and rest his
+elbows on the table, with his fixed smile and the hole in his head, and
+to hear him say in his plaintive voice. "Félicie, you surely cannot have
+forgotten our little room, in the Rue des Martyrs?"
+
+What he had become, for her, since his death, she could not have said,
+so alien was it to her beliefs, so contrary to her reason, and so
+antiquated, ridiculous and obsolete did the words which would have
+expressed her feeling seem to her. But from some remote inherited
+instinct, or more likely from certain tales which she had heard in her
+childhood, she derived a confused idea that he was of the number of
+those dead who in the days of old were wont to torment the living, and
+were exorcised by the priests; for upon thinking of him she
+instinctively began to make the sign of the cross, and she checked
+herself only that she might not seem ridiculous.
+
+Ligny, seeing her melancholy and distracted, blamed himself for his
+harsh and useless words, while at the very moment of reproaching
+himself for them he followed them by others equally harsh and equally
+useless.
+
+"And yet you told me it was not true!"
+
+She replied, fervently:
+
+"Because, don't you see, I wanted it not to be true."
+
+She added:
+
+"Oh, my darling, since I've been yours, I swear to you that I've not
+belonged to anyone else. I don't claim any merit for this; I should have
+found it impossible."
+
+Like the young of animals, she had need of gaiety. The wine, which shone
+in her glass like liquid amber, was a joy to her eyes, and she moistened
+her tongue with it with luxurious pleasure. She took an interest in the
+dishes set before her, and especially in the _pommes de terre
+soufflées_, like golden blisters. Next she watched the people lunching
+at the tables in the dining-room, attributing to them, according to
+their appearance, ridiculous opinions or grotesque passions. She noticed
+the ill-natured glances which the women directed toward her, and the
+efforts of the men to appear handsome and important. And she gave
+utterance to a general reflection:
+
+"Robert, have you noticed that people are never natural? They do not say
+a thing because they think it. They say it because they think it is
+what they ought to say. This habit makes them very wearisome. And it is
+extremely rare to find anyone who is natural. You, you are natural."
+
+"Well, I don't think I'm guilty of posing."
+
+"You pose like the rest. But you pose in your own character. I can see
+perfectly well when you are trying to surprise and impress me."
+
+She spoke to him of himself and, led back by an involuntary train of
+thought to the tragedy enacted at Neuilly, she inquired:
+
+"Did your mother say anything to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Yet she must have known."
+
+"It is probable."
+
+"Are you on good terms with her?"
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+"They say she is still very beautiful, your mother, is it so?"
+
+He did not answer her and sought to change the conversation. He did not
+like Félicie to speak to him of his mother, or to turn her attention to
+his family. Monsieur and Madame de Ligny enjoyed the highest
+consideration in Parisian society. Monsieur de Ligny, a diplomatist by
+birth and by profession, was in himself a person worthy of the greatest
+consideration. He was so even before his birth, by virtue of the
+diplomatic services which his ancestors had rendered to France. His
+great-grandfather had signed the surrender of Pondicherry to England.
+Madame de Ligny lived with her husband on the most correct terms. But,
+although she had no money of her own, she lived in great style, and her
+gowns were one of the greatest glories of France. She received intimate
+visits from an ex-Ambassador. His age, his position, his opinions, his
+titles, and his great fortune made the connection respectable. Madame de
+Ligny kept the ladies of the Republic at arm's length, and, when the
+spirit moved her, gave them lessons in decorum. She had nothing to fear
+from the opinion of the fashionable world. Robert knew that she was
+looked upon with respect by people in society. But he was continually
+dreading that, in speaking of her, Félicie might fail to do so with all
+the needful reserve. He feared lest, not being in society, she might say
+that which had better have been left unsaid. He was wrong; Félicie knew
+nothing of the private life of Madame de Ligny; moreover, had she known
+of it, she would not have blamed her. The lady inspired her with a naive
+curiosity and an admiration mingled with fear. Since her lover was
+unwilling to speak to her of his mother, she attributed his reserve to a
+certain aristocratic arrogance, even to a lack of consideration, for
+her, at which the pride of the freewoman and the plebeian was up in
+arms. She was wont to say to him tartly:
+
+"I'm perfectly free to speak of your mother." The first time she had
+added: "Mine is just as good as yours." But she had realized that the
+remark was vulgar, and she had not repeated it.
+
+The dining-room was now empty. She looked at her watch, and saw that it
+was three o'clock.
+
+"I must be off," she said. "_La Grille_ is being rehearsed this
+afternoon. Constantin Marc ought to be at the theatre already. There's
+another queer fellow for you! He boasts that when he's in the Vivarais
+he ruins all the women. And yet he is so shy that he daren't even talk
+to Fagette and Falempin. I frighten him. It amuses me."
+
+She was so tired that she had not the courage to rise.
+
+"Isn't it queer? They are saying everywhere that I'm engaged for the
+Français, it's not true. There's not even a question of it. Of course, I
+can't remain indefinitely where I am. In the long run one would get
+besotted there. But there is no hurry. I have a great part to create in
+_La Grille_. We shall see after that. What I want is to play comedy. I
+don't want to join the Français and then to do nothing."
+
+Suddenly, gazing in front of her with eyes full of terror, she flung
+herself backwards, turned pale, and uttered a shrill scream. Then her
+eyelids fluttered, and she murmured that she could not breathe.
+
+Robert loosened her jacket, and moistened her temples with a little
+water.
+
+She spoke.
+
+"A priest! I saw a priest. He was in his surplice. His lips were moving,
+but no sound came from them. He looked at me."
+
+He tried to comfort her.
+
+"Come now, my darling, how can you suppose that a priest, a priest in
+his surplice, would show himself in a restaurant?"
+
+She listened obediently, and allowed herself to be persuaded.
+
+"You are right, you are right, I know it well enough."
+
+In that little head of hers illusions were soon dispelled. She was born
+two hundred and thirty years after the death of Descartes, of whom she
+had never heard; yet, as Dr. Socrates would have said, he had taught her
+the use of reason.
+
+Robert met her at six o'clock after the rehearsal, under the arcades of
+the Odéon, and drove away with her in a cab.
+
+"Where are we going?" she inquired.
+
+He hesitated a little.
+
+"You would not care to go back to our house out there?"
+
+She cried out at the suggestion.
+
+"Oh no! I couldn't! Oh, heavens, never!"
+
+He replied that he had thought as much; that he would try to find
+something else: a little ground-floor flat in Paris; that in the
+meantime, just for to-day, they would content themselves with a chance
+abode.
+
+She gazed at him with fixed, heavy eyes, drew him violently towards her,
+scorching his neck and ear with the breath of her desire. Then her arms
+fell away from him, and she sank back beside him, dejected and relaxed.
+
+When the cab stopped, she said:
+
+"You will not be vexed with me, will you, my own Robert, at what I am
+going to say? Not to-day--to-morrow."
+
+She had considered it necessary to make this sacrifice to the jealous
+dead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+On the following day, he took her to a furnished room, commonplace but
+cheerful, which he had selected on the first floor of a house facing the
+square, near the Bibliothèque Nationale. In the centre of the square
+stood the basin of a fountain, supported by lusty nymphs. The paths,
+bordered with laurel and spindlewood, were deserted, and from this
+little-frequented spot one heard the vast and reassuring hum of the
+city. The rehearsal had finished very late. When they entered the room
+the night, already slower to arrive in this season of melting snow, was
+beginning to cast its gloom over the hangings. The large mirrors of the
+wardrobe and overmantel were filling with vague lights and shadows. She
+took off her fur coat, went to look out of the window between the
+curtains and said:
+
+"Robert, the steps are wet."
+
+He answered that there was no flight of steps, only the pavement and the
+road, and then another pavement and the railings of the square.
+
+"You are a Parisian, you know this square well. In the centre, among the
+trees, there is a monumental fountain, with enormous women whose breasts
+are not as pretty as yours."
+
+In his impatience he helped her to undo her cloth frock; but he could
+not find the hooks, and scratched himself with the pins.
+
+"I am clumsy," he said.
+
+She retorted laughingly:
+
+"You are certainly not so clever as Madame Michon! It's not so much
+clumsiness, but you are afraid of getting pricked. Men are a cowardly
+race. As for women, they have to accustom themselves to suffer. It's
+true: to be a woman is to be nearly always ailing."
+
+He did not notice that she was pale, with dark rings round her eyes. He
+desired her so ardently; he no longer saw her.
+
+"They are very sensitive to pain," he said, "but they are also very
+sensitive to pleasure. Do you know Claude Bernard?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He was a great scientist. He said that he didn't hesitate to recognize
+woman's supremacy in the domain of physical and moral sensibility."
+
+Nantueil; unhooking her stays, replied:
+
+"If he meant by that that all women are sensitive, he was indeed an old
+greenhorn. He ought to have seen Fagette; he would soon have discovered
+whether it was easy to get anything out of her in the domain--how did he
+express it?--of physical and moral sensibility."
+
+And she added with gentle pride:
+
+"Don't you make any mistake, Robert, there's not such a heap of women
+like myself."
+
+As he was drawing her into his arms, she released herself.
+
+"You are hindering me."
+
+Sitting down and doubling herself up in order to undo her boots, she
+continued.
+
+"Do you know, Dr. Socrates told me the other day that he had seen an
+apparition. He saw a donkey-boy who had murdered a little girl. I dreamt
+of the story last night, only in my dream I could not make out whether
+the donkey-boy was a man or a woman. What a mix-up the dream was!
+Talking of Dr. Socrates, just guess whose lover he is--why, the lady who
+keeps the circulating library in the Rue Mazarine. She is no longer very
+young, but she is very intelligent. Do you think he is faithful to her?
+I'll take off my stockings, it's more becoming."
+
+And she went on to tell him a story of the theatre:
+
+"I really don't think I shall remain at the Odéon much longer."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You'll see. Pradel said to me to-day, before rehearsal 'My dear little
+Nanteuil, there has never been anything between us. It is ridiculous.'
+He was extremely decorous, but he gave me to understand that we were in
+a false position with regard to one another, which could not go on
+indefinitely. You must know that Pradel has established a rule. Formerly
+he used to pick and choose among his _pensionnaires_. He had favourites,
+and that caused an outcry. Nowadays, for the better administration of
+the theatre, he takes them all, even those he has no liking for, even
+those who are distasteful to him. There are no more favourites.
+Everything goes splendidly. Ah, he's a director all through, is Pradel!"
+
+As Robert, in the bed, listened in silence, she went up to him and shook
+him:
+
+"Then it's all the same to you if I carry on with Pradel?"
+
+"No, my dear, it would not be all the same to me. But nothing I might
+say would prevent it."
+
+Bending over him, she caressed him ardently, pretending to threaten and
+to punish him; and she cried:
+
+"Then you don't really love me, that you are not jealous. I insist that
+you shall be jealous."
+
+Then, suddenly, she moved away from him, and hitching over her left
+shoulder her chemise, which had slipped down under her right breast, she
+loitered in front of the dressing-table and inquired uneasily:
+
+"Robert, you have not brought anything here from the other room?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Thereupon, softly, timidly, she slipped into the bed. But hardly had she
+lain down when she raised herself from the pillow on her elbow, and,
+craning her neck, listened with parted lips. It seemed to her that she
+could hear slight sounds of footsteps along the gravel path which she
+had heard in the house in the Boulevard de Villiers. She ran to the
+window; she saw the Judas tree, the lawn, the garden gate. Knowing what
+she was yet to see, she sought to hide her face in her hands, but she
+could not raise her arms, and Chevalier's face rose up before her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+She had returned home in a burning fever. Robert, after dining _en
+famille_, had retired to his attic. His nerves were on edge, and he was
+badly out of temper as a result of the manner in which Nanteuil had left
+him.
+
+His shirt and his clothes, laid out on the bed by his valet, seemed to
+be waiting for him in a domestic and obsequious attitude. He began to
+dress himself with a somewhat ill-tempered alacrity. He was impatient to
+leave the house. He opened his round window, listened to the murmur of
+the city, and saw above the roofs the glow which rose into the sky from
+the city of Paris. He scented from afar all the amorous flesh gathered,
+on this winter's night, in the theatres and the great _cabarets_, the
+café-concerts and the bars.
+
+Irritated by Félicie's denial of his desires, he had decided to satisfy
+them elsewhere, and as he was not conscious of any preference he
+believed that his only difficulty would be to make a choice; but he
+presently realized that he had no desire for any of the women of his
+acquaintance, nor did he even feel any desire for an unknown woman. He
+closed his window, and seated himself before the fire.
+
+It was a coke fire; Madame de Ligny, who wore cloaks costing a thousand
+pounds, was wont to economize in the matter of her table and her fires.
+She would not allow wood to be burned in her house.
+
+He reflected upon his own affairs, to which he had so far given little
+or no thought; upon the career he had embraced, and which he beheld
+obscurely before him. The Minister was a great friend of his family. A
+mountaineer of the Cévennes, brought up on chestnuts, his dazzled eyes
+blinked at the flower-bedecked tables of Paris. He was too shrewd and
+too wily not to retain his advantage over the old aristocracy, which
+welcomed him to its bosom: the advantage of harsh caprices and arrogant
+refusals. Ligny knew him, and expected no favours at his hands. In this
+respect he was more perspicacious than his mother, who credited herself
+with a certain power over the dark, hairy little man, whom every
+Thursday she engulfed in her majestic skirts on the way from the
+drawing-room to the dinner-table. He judged him to be disobliging. And
+then something had gone wrong between them. Robert, as ill luck would
+have it, had forestalled his Minister in his intimacy with a lady whom
+the latter loved to the verge of absurdity: Madame de Neuilles, a woman
+of easy virtue. And it seemed to him that the hairy little man suspected
+it, and regarded him with an unfriendly eye. And, lastly, the idea had
+grown upon him at the Quai d'Orsay that Ministers are neither able nor
+willing to do very much. But he did not exaggerate matters, and thought
+it quite possible that he might obtain a minor secretaryship. Such had
+been his wish hitherto. He was most anxious not to leave Paris. His
+mother, on the contrary, would have preferred that he should be sent to
+The Hague, where a post as third secretary was vacant. Now, of a sudden,
+he decided in favour of The Hague. "I'll go," he said. "The sooner the
+better." Having made up his mind, he reviewed his reasons. In the first
+place, it would be an excellent thing for his future career. Again, The
+Hague post was a pleasant one. A friend of his, who had held it, had
+enlarged upon the delightful hypocrisy of the sleepy little capital,
+where everything was engineered and "wangled" for the comfort of the
+Diplomatic Corps. He reflected, also, that The Hague was the august
+cradle of a new international law, and finally went so far as to invoke
+the argument that he would be giving pleasure to his mother. After which
+he realized that he wanted to leave home solely on account of Félicie.
+
+His thoughts of her were not benevolent. He knew her to be mendacious,
+timorous, and a malicious friend. He had proof that she was given to
+falling in love with actors of the lowest type, or, at all events, that
+she made shift with them. He was not certain that she did not deceive
+him, not that he had discovered anything suspect in the life which she
+was leading, but because he was properly distrustful of all women. He
+conjured up in his mind all the evil that he knew of her, and persuaded
+himself that she was a little jade, and, being conscious that he loved
+her, he believed that he loved her merely because of her extreme
+prettiness. This reason seemed to him a sound one; but on analysing it
+he perceived that it explained nothing; that he loved the girl not
+because she was exceedingly pretty, but because she was pretty in a
+certain uncommon fashion of her own; that he loved her for that which
+was incomparable and rare in her; because, in a word, she was a
+wonderful thing of art and voluptuousness, a living gem of priceless
+value. Thereupon, realizing how weak he was, he wept, mourning over his
+lost freedom, his captive mind, his disordered soul, the devotion of his
+very flesh and blood to a weak, perfidious little creature.
+
+He had scorched his eyes by gazing at the coke fire behind the bars of
+the grate. He closed them in pain and, under his closed eyes, he saw
+negroes leaping before him in an obscene and bloody riot. While he
+sought to remember from what book of travel, read in boyhood, these
+blacks emerged, he saw them diminish, resolve themselves into
+imperceptible specks, and disappear into a red Africa, which little by
+little came to represent the wound seen by the light of a match on the
+night of the suicide. He reflected.
+
+"That fool of a Chevalier! Why, I was scarcely thinking of the fellow!"
+
+Suddenly, against this background of blood and flame; appeared the
+slender form of Félicie, and he felt lurking within him a hot, cruel
+desire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+He went to see her the following day, in the little flat in the
+Boulevard Saint-Michel. He was not in the habit of going thither. He did
+not particularly care to meet Madame Nanteuil; she bored him and
+embarrassed him, although she was extremely polite to him, even to
+obsequiousness.
+
+It was she who received him in the little drawing-room. She thanked him
+for his interest in Félicie's health, and informed him that she had been
+restless and unwell the night before, but was now feeling better.
+
+"She is in her bedroom, working at her part. I will tell her that you
+are here. She will be very glad to see you, Monsieur de Ligny. She knows
+that you are very fond of her. And true friends are rare, especially in
+the theatrical world."
+
+Robert observed Madame Nanteuil with an attention which he had not
+hitherto bestowed upon her. He was trying to see in her face the face
+that would be her daughter's in years to come. When walking in the
+street he was fond of reading, in the faces of the mothers, the
+love-affairs of the daughters. And on this occasion he assiduously
+deciphered the features and the figure of this woman as an interesting
+prophecy. He discovered nothing either of bad or good augury. Madame
+Nanteuil, plump, fresh-complexioned, cool-skinned, was not unattractive
+with the sensuous fullness of her contours. But her daughter did not in
+the least resemble her.
+
+Seeing her so collected and serene, he said to her:
+
+"You yourself are not of a nervous temperament?"
+
+"I have never been nervous. My daughter does not take after me. She is
+the living image of her father. He was delicate, although his health was
+not bad. He died of a fall from his horse. You'll take a cup of tea,
+won't you, Monsieur de Ligny?"
+
+Félicie entered the room. Her hair was outspread upon her shoulders; she
+was wrapped in a white woollen dressing-gown, held very loosely at the
+waist by a heavy embroidered girdle, and she shuffled along in red
+slippers; she looked a mere child. The friend of the house, Tony Meyer,
+the picture dealer, was wont when he saw her in this garment, which was
+a trifle monkish in appearance, to call her Brother Ange de Charolais,
+because he had discovered in her a resemblance to a portrait by Nattier
+which represented Mademoiselle de Charolais in the Franciscan habit.
+Before this little girl, Robert was surprised and silent.
+
+"It's kind of you," she said, "to have come to inquire after me. I am
+better, thank you."
+
+"She works very hard; she works too hard," said Madame Nanteuil. "Her
+part in _La Grille_ is tiring her."
+
+"Oh no, mother."
+
+They spoke of the theatre, and the conversation languished.
+
+During a moment's silence, Madame Nanteuil asked Monsieur de Ligny if he
+were still collecting old fashion-prints.
+
+Félicie and Robert looked at her without understanding. They had told
+her not long before some fiction about engraved fashion-plates, to
+explain the meetings which they had not been able to conceal. But they
+had quite forgotten the fact. Since then, a piece of the moon, as an old
+author has said, had fallen into their love; Madame Nanteuil alone, in
+her profound respect for fiction, remembered it.
+
+"My daughter told me you had a great number of those old engravings and
+that she used to find ideas for her costumes in them."
+
+"Quite so, madame, quite so."
+
+"Come here, Monsieur de Ligny," said Félicie. "I want to show you a
+design for a costume for the part of Cécile de Rochemaure."
+
+And she carried him off to her room.
+
+It was a small room hung with flowered paper; the furniture consisted of
+a wardrobe with a mirror, a couple of chairs upholstered in horsehairs
+and an iron bedstead; with a white counterpane; above it was a bowl for
+holy water, and a sprig of boxwood.
+
+She gave him a long kiss on the mouth.
+
+"I do love you, do you know!"
+
+"Quite sure?"
+
+"Oh yes! And you?"
+
+"I too, I love you. I wouldn't have believed that I could love you so!"
+
+"Then it came afterwards."
+
+"It always comes afterwards."
+
+"That's true, what you've just said, Robert. Before--one doesn't know."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I was very ill yesterday."
+
+"Have you seen Trublet? What did he say?"
+
+"He told me that I needed rest, and quiet. My darling, we must be
+sensible for another fortnight. Do you mind?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"So do I. But what would you have?"
+
+He strolled round the room two or three times, looking into every
+corner. She watched him with some little uneasiness, dreading lest he
+should ask her questions about her poor jewels and her cheap trinkets,
+which were modest enough as presents, but she could not in every case
+explain how she came to receive them. One may say anything one pleases,
+of course, but one may contradict oneself, and get into trouble, and
+that assuredly is not worth while. She diverted his attention.
+
+"Robert, open my glove-box."
+
+"What have you got in your glove-box?"
+
+"The violets you gave me the first time. Darling, don't leave me! Don't
+go away. When I think that from one day to the next you may go to some
+foreign country, to London, to Constantinople, I feel crazy."
+
+He comforted her, telling her that there had been some thought of
+sending him to The Hague. But he was determined not to go; he would get
+himself attached to the Minister's staff.
+
+"You promise?"
+
+He gave the promise in all sincerity. And she became quite cheerful.
+
+Pointing to the little wardrobe with its looking-glass, she said:
+
+"Look, darling, it's there that I study my part. When you came, I was
+working over my scene in the fourth. I take advantage of being alone to
+try for the exact tone. I seek a broad, mellow effect. If I were to
+listen to Romilly I should mince my words, and the result would be
+wretched. I have to say. 'I do not fear you.' It's the great moment of
+the part. Do you know how Romilly would have me say: 'I do not fear
+you'? I'll show you, I am to raise my hand to my nose, open my fingers
+and speak one word to each finger separately, in a particular tone, with
+a special expression 'I, do, not, fear, you,' as if I were exhibiting
+marionettes! It's a wonder he does not ask me to put a little paper hat
+on every finger. Subtle, intellectual, isn't it?"
+
+Then, lifting her hair and uncovering her animated features, she said:
+
+"I'll show you how I do it."
+
+Suddenly transfigured, seeming of greater stature, she spoke the words
+with an air of ingenuous dignity and serene innocence:
+
+"No, sir, I do not fear you. Why should I fear you? You thought to
+ensnare me, and you have placed yourself at my mercy. You are a man of
+honour. Now that I am under the shelter of your roof, you shall tell me
+what you told Chevalier d'Amberre, your enemy, when he entered that
+gate. You shall tell me: 'You are in your own house; I am yours to
+command.'"
+
+She had the mysterious gift of changing her soul and her very face.
+Ligny was under the spell of this beautiful illusion.
+
+"You are marvellous!"
+
+"Listen, pussy-cat. I shall wear a big lawn bonnet with lappets, one
+above the other, on either side of my face. You see, in the play I am a
+young girl of the Revolution. And it is imperative that I should make
+people feel it. I must have the Revolution _in_ me, do you understand?"
+
+"Are you well up in the Revolution?"
+
+"Of course I am! I don't know the dates, to be sure. But I have the
+feeling of the period. For me, the Revolution means a bosom swelling
+with pride under a crossed neckerchief, knees enjoying full freedom in a
+striped petticoat, and a tiny blaze of colour on the cheek-bones. There
+you have it!"
+
+He asked her questions about the play, and he realized that she knew
+nothing about it. She, did not need to know anything about it. She
+divined, she found by instinct all that she needed from it.
+
+"At rehearsals, I never give them a hint as to any of my effects, I keep
+them all for the public. It will make Romilly tear his hair. How stupid
+they'll all look! Fagette, my dear, will make herself ill over it."
+
+She sat down on a little rickety chair. Her forehead, but a moment
+before as white as marble, was rosy; she had once more assumed her
+cheeky flapper's expression.
+
+He drew near to her, gazed into the fascinating grey of her eyes, and,
+as on the evening before, when he sat in front of his coke-fire, he
+reflected that she was untruthful and cowardly, and ill-natured toward
+her friends; but now the thought was tempered with indulgence. He
+reflected that she had love-affairs with actors of the lowest type, or
+that she at least made shift with them; but the thought was tempered
+with a gentle pity. He recalled all the evil that he knew of her, but
+without bitterness. He felt that he loved her, less because she was
+pretty than because she was pretty in her own fashion; in a word, that
+he loved her because she was a gem endowed with life, and an
+incomparable thing of art and voluptuousness. He looked into the
+fascinating grey of her eyes, into their pupils, where tiny astrological
+symbols seemed to float in a luminous tide. He gazed at her with a gaze
+so searching that she felt it pierce right through her. And, assured
+that he had seen right into her, she said to him, with her eyes on his,
+clasping his head between her two hands:
+
+"Oh yes! I'm a rotten little actress; but I love you, and I don't care a
+rap for money. And there aren't many as good as me. And you know it well
+enough."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+They met daily at the theatre, and they went for walks together.
+
+Nanteuil was playing almost every night, and was eagerly working at her
+part of Cécile. She was gradually recovering her peace of mind; her
+nights were less disturbed; she no longer made her mother hold her hand
+while she fell asleep and no longer found herself suffocating in
+nightmares. A fortnight went by in this fashion. Then, one morning,
+while sitting at her dressing-table, combing her hairs she bent her head
+toward the glass, as the weather was overcast, and she saw in it, not
+her own face, but the face of the dead man. A thread of blood was
+trickling from one corner of his mouth; he was smiling and gazing at
+her.
+
+Thereupon she decided to do what she thought would be the proper and
+efficacious thing. She took a cab and drove off to see him. Going down
+the Boulevard Saint-Michel she bought a bunch of roses at her florist's.
+She took them to him. She went down on her knees before the tiny black
+cross which marked the spot where they had laid him. She spoke to him,
+she begged him to be reasonable, to leave her in peace. She asked his
+forgiveness for having treated him formerly with harshness. People did
+not always understand one another in life. But now he ought to
+understand and forgive her. What good did it do to him to torment her?
+She asked no better than to retain a kindly memory of him. She would
+come and see him from time to time. But he must cease to persecute and
+frighten her.
+
+She sought to flatter and soothe him with gentle phrases.
+
+"I can understand that you wanted to revenge yourself. It was natural.
+But you are not wicked at heart. Don't be angry any more. Don't frighten
+me any more. Don't come to see me any more. I'll come to you; I'll come
+often. I'll bring you flowers."
+
+She longed to deceive him, to soothe him with lying promises, to say to
+him "Stay where you are; do not be restless any longer; stay where you
+are, and I swear to you that I will never again do anything to offend
+you; I promise to submit to your will." But she dared not lie over a
+grave, and she was sure that it would be useless, that the dead know
+everything.
+
+A little wearied, she continued awhile, more indolently, her prayers
+and supplications, and she realized that she no longer felt the horror
+with which the tombs had formerly inspired her; that she had no fear of
+the dead man. She sought the reason for this, and discovered that he did
+not frighten her because he was not there.
+
+And she mused:
+
+"He is not there; he is never there; he is everywhere except where they
+laid him. He is in the streets, in the houses, in the rooms."
+
+And she rose to her feet in despair, feeling sure that henceforth she
+would meet him everywhere except in the cemetery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+After a fortnight's patience Ligny urged her to resume their former
+intercourse. The period which she herself had fixed had elapsed. He
+would not wait any longer. She suffered as much as he did in refusing
+herself to him. But she dreaded to see the dead man return. She found
+lame excuses for postponing appointments; at last she confessed that she
+was afraid. He despised her for displaying so little common sense and
+courage. He no longer felt that she loved him, and he spoke harshly to
+her, but he pursued her incessantly with his desire.
+
+Bitter days and barren hours followed. As she no longer dared to seek
+the shelter of a roof in his company, they used to take a cab, and after
+driving for hours about the outskirts of the city they would alight in
+some gloomy avenue, wandering far down it under the bitter east wind,
+walking swiftly, as though chastised by the breath of an unseen wrath.
+
+Once, however, the weather was so mild that it filled them with its soft
+languor. Side by side they trod the deserted paths of the Bois de
+Boulogne. The buds, which were beginning to swell on the tips of the
+slender black branches, dyed the tree-tops violet under the rosy sky. To
+their left stretched the fields, dotted with clumps of leafless trees,
+and the houses of Auteuil were visible. Slowly driven coupés, with their
+elderly passengers, crawled along the road, and the wet-nurses pushed
+their perambulators. A motor-car broke the silence of the Bois with its
+humming.
+
+"Do you like those machines?" asked Félicie.
+
+"I find them convenient, that's all."
+
+It was true that he was no chauffeur. He had no taste for any kind of
+sport; he concerned himself only with women.
+
+Pointing to a cab which had just passed them, she exclaimed:
+
+"Robert, did you see?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Jeanne Perrin was in it with a woman."
+
+And, as he displayed a calm indifference, she added in a reproachful
+tone:
+
+"You are like Dr. Socrates. Do you think that sort of thing natural?"
+
+The lake slept, bright and serene, within its sombre walls of pines.
+They took the path to their right, which skirted the bank where the
+white geese and swans were preening their feathers. At their approach a
+flotilla of ducks, like living hulls, their necks curving like prows,
+set sail toward them.
+
+Félicie told them, in a regretful tone, that she had nothing to give
+them.
+
+"When I was little," she went on to say, "Papa used to take me out on
+Sundays to feed the animals. It was my reward for having learned my
+lessons well all the week. Papa used to delight in the country. He was
+fond of dog, horses, all animals in fact. He was very gentle and very
+clever. He used to work very hard. But life is difficult for an officer
+who has no money of his own. It grieved him sorely not to be able to do
+as the wealthy officers did, and then he didn't hit it off with Mamma.
+Papa's life was not a happy one. He was often wretched. He didn't talk
+much; but we two understood one another without speaking. He was very
+fond of me. Robert, dearest, later on, in the distant future, the very
+distant future, I shall have a tiny house in the country. And when you
+come there, my beloved, you will find me in a short skirt, throwing corn
+to my fowls."
+
+He asked her what gave her the idea of going on the stage.
+
+"I knew very well that I'd never find a husband, since I had no dowry.
+And from what I saw of my older girl friends, working at dress-making or
+in a telegraph office, I was not encouraged to follow in their steps.
+When I was quite a little girl I thought it would be nice to be an
+actress. I had once acted, at my boarding-school, in a little play, on
+St. Nicholas' Day. I thought it no end of a lark. The schoolmistress
+said I didn't act well, but that was because Mamma owed her for a whole
+term. From the time I was fifteen I began to think seriously about going
+on the stage. I entered the Conservatoire, I worked, I worked very hard.
+It's a back-breaking trade. But success brings rest."
+
+Opposite the chalet on the island they found the ferry-boat moored to
+the landing. Ligny jumped into it, pulling Félicie after him.
+
+"Those tall trees are lovely, even without leaves," she said. "But I
+thought the chalet was closed at this time of the year."
+
+The ferryman told them that, on fine winter days, people out for a walk
+liked to visit the island, because they could enjoy quiet there, and
+that he had only just ferried a couple of ladies across.
+
+A waiter, who was living amid the solitude of the island, brought them
+tea, in a rustic sitting-room, furnished with a couple of chairs, a
+table, a piano, and a sofa. The panelling was mildewed, the planks of
+the flooring had started. Félicie looked out of the window at the lawn
+and the tall trees.
+
+"What is that," she asked, "that big dark ball on the poplar?"
+
+"That's mistletoe, my pet."
+
+"One would think it was an animal rolled round the branch, gnawing at
+it. It isn't nice to look at."
+
+She rested her head on her lover's shoulder, saying in a languid tone:
+
+"I love you."
+
+He drew her down upon the sofa. She felt him, kneeling at her feet, his
+hands, clumsy with impatience, gliding over her, and she suffered his
+attempts, inert, discouraged, foreseeing that it was useless. Her ears
+were ringing like a little bell. The ringing ceased, and she heard; on
+her right, a strange, clear, glacial voice say. "I forbid you to belong
+to one another." It seemed to her that the voice spoke from above, in
+the glow of light, but she did not dare to turn her head. It was an
+unfamiliar voice. Involuntarily and despite herself she tried to
+remember his voice, and she realized that she had forgotten its sound,
+and that she could never again remember it. The thought came to her
+"Perhaps this is the voice he has now." Terrified, she swiftly pushed
+her skirt over her knees. But she refrained from crying out, and she did
+not speak of what she had just heard, lest she should be taken for a
+madwoman, and because she realized somehow that it was not real.
+
+Ligny drew away from her.
+
+"If you don't want anything more to do with me, say so honestly. I am
+not going to take you by force."
+
+Sitting upright, with her knees pressed together, she told him:
+
+"Whenever we are in a crowd, as long as there are people about us, I
+want you, I long for you, but as soon as we are by ourselves I am
+afraid."
+
+He replied by a cheap, spiteful sneer:
+
+"Ah, if you must have a public to stimulate you!"
+
+She rose, and returned to the window. A tear was running down her cheek.
+She wept for some time in silence. Suddenly she called to him:
+
+"Look there!"
+
+She pointed to Jeanne Perrin, who was strolling on the lawn with a young
+woman. Each had an arm about the other's waist; they were giving one
+another violets to smell, and were smiling.
+
+"See! That woman is happy; her mind at peace."
+
+And Jeanne Perrin, tasting the peace of long-established habits,
+strolled along satisfied and serene, without even betraying any pride in
+her strange preference.
+
+Félicie watched her with, an interest which she did not confess to
+herself, and envied her her serenity.
+
+"She's not afraid, that woman."
+
+"Let her be! What harm is she doing us?"
+
+And he caught her violently by the waist. She freed herself with a
+shudder. In the end, disappointed, frustrated, humiliated, he lost his
+temper, called her a silly fool, and swore that he would not stand her
+ridiculous way of treating him any longer.
+
+She made no reply, and once more she began to weep.
+
+Angered by her tears, he told her harshly:
+
+"Since you can no longer give me what I ask you, it is useless for us to
+meet any more. There is nothing more to be said between us. Besides, I
+see that you have ceased to love me. And you would admit, if for once
+you could speak the truth, that you have never loved anyone except that
+wretched second-rate actor."
+
+Then her anger exploded, and she moaned in despair:
+
+"Liar! Liar! That's an abominable thing to say. You see I'm crying, and
+you want to make me suffer more. You take advantage of the fact that I
+love you to make me miserable. It's cowardly. Well, no then, I don't
+love you any longer. Go away! I don't want to see you again. Go! But
+it's true--what are we doing like this? Are we going to spend our lives
+staring at each other like this, wild with each other, full of despair
+and rage? It is not my fault--I can't, I can't. Forgive me, darling, I
+love you, I worship you, I want you. Only drive him away. You are a man,
+you know what there is to do. Drive him away. You killed him, not I. It
+was you. Kill him altogether then--Oh God, I am going mad. I am going
+mad!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the following day, Ligny applied to be sent as Third Secretary to The
+Hague. He was appointed a week later, and left at once, without having
+seen Félicie again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Madam Nanteuil thought of nothing but her daughter's welfare. Her
+liaison with Tony Meyers the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy, left
+her with plenty of leisure and an unoccupied heart. She met at the
+theatre a Monsieur Bondois, a manufacturer of electrical apparatus; he
+was still young, superior to his trade, and extremely well-mannered. He
+was blessed with an amorous temperament and a bashful nature, and, as
+young and beautiful women frightened him, he had accustomed himself to
+desiring only women who were not young and beautiful. Madame Nanteuil
+was still a very pleasing woman. But one night when she was badly
+dressed, and did not look her best; he made her the offer of his
+affections. She accepted him as something of a help toward housekeeping,
+and so that her daughter should want for nothing. Her devotion brought
+her happiness. Monsieur Bondois loved her, and courted her most
+ardently. At the outset this surprised her; then it brought her
+happiness and peace of mind; it seemed to her natural and good to be
+loved, and she could not believe that her time for love was past when
+she was in receipt of proof to the contrary.
+
+She had always displayed a kindly disposition, an easy-going character,
+and an even temper. But never yet had she revealed in her home so happy
+a spirit and such gracious thoughtfulness. Kind to others, and to
+herself, always preserving, in the lapse of changeful hours, the smile
+that disclosed her beautiful teeth and brought the dimples into her
+plump cheeks, grateful to life for what it was giving her, blooming,
+expanding, overflowing, she was the joy and the youth of the house.
+
+While Madame Nanteuil conceived and gave expression to bright and
+cheerful ideas, Félicie was fast becoming gloomy, fretful, and sullen.
+Lines began to show in her pretty face; her voice assumed a grating
+quality. She had at once realized the position which Monsieur Bondois
+occupied in the household, and, whether she would have preferred her
+mother to live and breathe for her alone, whether her filial piety
+suffered because she was forced to respect her less, whether she envied
+her happiness, or whether she merely felt the distress which love
+affairs cause us when we are brought into too close contact with them,
+Félicie, more especially at meal-times, and every day, bitterly
+reproached Madame Nanteuil, in very pointed allusions, and in terms
+which were not precisely veiled, in respect of this new "friend of the
+family"; and for Monsieur Bondois himself, whenever she met him, she
+exhibited an expressive disgust and an unconcealed aversion. Madame
+Nanteuil was only moderately distressed by this, and she excused her
+daughter by reflecting that the young girl had as yet no experience of
+life. And Monsieur Bondois, whom Félicie inspired with a superhuman
+terror, strove to placate her by signs of respect and inconsiderable
+presents.
+
+She was violent because she was suffering. The letters which she
+received from The Hague inflamed her love, so that it was a pain to her.
+A prey to consuming visions, she was pining away. When she saw her
+absent friend too clearly her temples throbbed, her heart beat
+violently, and a dense increasing shadow would darken her mind. All the
+sensibility of her nerves, all the warmth of her blood, all the forces
+of her being flowed through her, sinking downwards, merging themselves
+in desire in the very depths of her flesh. At such times she had no
+other thought than to recover Ligny. It was Ligny that she wanted, only
+Ligny, and she herself was surprised at the disgust which she felt for
+all other men. For her instincts had not always been so exclusive. She
+told herself that she would go at once to Bondois, ask him for money,
+and take the train for The Hague. And she did not do it. What deterred
+her was not so much the idea of displeasing her lover, who would have
+looked upon such a journey as bad form, as the vague fear of awakening
+the slumbering shadow.
+
+That she had not seen since Ligny's departure. But perturbing things
+were happening, within her and around her. In the street she was
+followed by a water-spaniel, which appealed and vanished suddenly. One
+morning when she was in bed her mother told her "I am going to the
+dressmaker's," and went out. Two or three minutes later Félicie saw her
+come back into the room as if she had forgotten something. But the
+apparition advanced without a look at her, without a word, without a
+sounds and disappeared as it touched the bed.
+
+She had even more disturbing illusions. One Sunday, she was acting, in a
+matinée of _Athalie_, the part of young Zacharias. As she had very
+pretty legs she found the disguise not displeasing; she was glad also to
+show that she knew how verse should be spoken. But she noticed that in
+the orchestra stalls there was a priest wearing his cassock. It was not
+the first time that an ecclesiastic had been present at an afternoon
+performance of this tragedy drawn from the Scriptures. Nevertheless, it
+impressed her disagreeably. When she went on the stage she distinctly
+saw Louise Dalle, wearing the turban of Jehoshabeath; loading a revolver
+in front of the prompter's box. She had enough common sense and presence
+of mind to reject this absurd vision, which disappeared. But she spoke
+her first lines in an inaudible voice.
+
+She had burning pains in the stomach. She suffered from fits of
+suffocation, sometimes, without apparent cause, an unspeakable agony
+gripped her bowels, her heart beat madly and she feared that she must be
+dying.
+
+Dr Trublet attended her with watchful prudence. She often saw him at the
+theatre, and occasionally went to consult him at his old house in the
+Rue de Seine. She did not go through the waiting-room; the servant would
+show her at once into the little dining-room, where Arab potteries
+glinted in the shadows, and she was always the first to be shown in. One
+day Socrates succeeded in making her understand the manner in which
+images are formed in the brain, and how these images do not always
+correspond with external objects, or, at my rate, do not always
+correspond exactly.
+
+"Hallucinations," he added, "are more often than not merely false
+perceptions. One sees a thing, but one sees it badly, so that a
+feather-broom becomes a head of bristling locks, a red carnation is a
+beast's open mouth, and a chemise is a ghost in its winding-sheet.
+Insignificant errors."
+
+From these arguments she derived sufficient strength to despise and
+dispel her visions of cats and dogs, or of persons who were living, and
+well known to her. Yet she dreaded seeing the dead man again; and the
+mystic terrors nestling in the obscure crannies of her brain were more
+powerful than the demonstrations of science. It was useless to tell her
+that the dead never returned; she knew very well that they did.
+
+On this occasion Socrates once more advised her to find some
+distraction, to visit her friends, and by preference the more pleasant
+of her friends, and to avoid darkness and solitude, as her two most
+treacherous enemies.
+
+And he added this prescription:
+
+"Especially must you avoid persons and things which may be connected
+with the object of your visions."
+
+He did not see that this was impossible. Nor did Nanteuil.
+
+"Then you will cure me, dear old Socrates," she said, turning upon him
+her pretty grey eyes, full of entreaty.
+
+"You will cure yourself my child. You will cure yourself, because you
+are hard-working, sensible, and courageous. Yes, yes, you are timid and
+brave at the same time. You dread danger, but you have the courage to
+live. You will be cured, because you are not in sympathy with evil and
+suffering. You will be cured because you want to be cured."
+
+"You think then that one can be cured if one wills it?"
+
+"When one wills it in a certain profound, intimate fashion, when it is
+our cells that will it within us, when it is our unconscious self that
+wills it; when one wills it with the secret, abounding, absolute will of
+the sturdy tree that wills itself to grow green again in the spring."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+That same night, being unable to sleep, she turned over in her bed, and
+threw back the bed-clothes. She felt that sleep was still far off, that
+it would come with the first rays, full of dancing atoms of dust, with
+which morning pierces the chinks between the curtains. The night-light,
+with its tiny burning heart shining through its porcelain shade, gave
+her a mystic and familiar companionship. Félicie opened her eyes and at
+a glance drank in the white milky glimmer which brought her peace of
+mind. Then, closing them once more, she relapsed into the tumultuous
+weariness of insomnia. Now and again a few words of her part recurred to
+her memory, words to which she attached no meaning, yet which obsessed
+her: "Our days are what we make them." And her mind wearied itself by
+turning over and over some four or five ideas.
+
+"I must go to Madame Royaumont to-morrow, to try on my gown. Yesterday I
+went with Fagette to Jeanne Perrin's dressing-room; she was dressing,
+and she showed her hairy legs, as if she was proud of them. She's not
+ugly, Jeanne Perrin; indeed, she has a fine head; but it is her
+expression that I dislike. How does Madame Colbert make out that I owe
+her thirty-two francs? Fourteen and three are seventeen, and nine,
+twenty-six. I owe her only twenty-six francs. 'Our days are what we make
+them.' How hot I feel!"
+
+With one swift movement of her supple loins she turned over, and her
+bare arms opened to embrace the air as though it had been a cool, subtle
+body.
+
+"It seems a hundred years since Robert went away. It was cruel of him to
+leave me alone. I am sick with longing for him." And curled up in her
+bed, she recollected intently the hours when they held each other in a
+close embrace. She called him:
+
+"My pussy-cat! Little wolf!"
+
+And immediately the same train of thoughts began once more their
+fatiguing procession through her mind.
+
+"Our days are what we make them. Our days are what we make them. Our
+days....' Fourteen and three, seventeen, and nine, twenty-six. I could
+see quite plainly that Jeanne Perrin showed her long man's legs, dark
+with hair, on purpose. Is it true what they say, that Jeanne Perrin
+gives money to women? I must try my gown on at four o'clock to-morrow.
+There's one dreadful thing, Madame Royaumont never can put in the
+sleeves properly. How hot I am! Socrates is a good doctor. But he does
+sometimes amuse himself by making you feel a stupid fool."
+
+Suddenly she thought of Chevalier, and she seemed to feel an influence
+emanating from him which was gliding along the walls of her bedroom. It
+seemed to her that the glimmer of the night-light was dimmed by it. It
+was less than a shadow, and it filled her with alarm. The idea suddenly
+flashed through her mind that this subtle thing had its origin in the
+portraits of the dead man. She had not kept any of them in her bedroom.
+But there were still some in the flat, some that she had not torn up.
+She carefully reckoned them up, and discovered that there must still be
+three left: the first, when he was quite young, showed him against a
+cloudy background; another, laughing and at his ease, sitting astride of
+a chair; a third as Don Cæsar de Bazan. In her hurry to destroy every
+vestige of them she sprang out of bed, lit a candle, and in her
+nightgown shuffled along in her slippers into the drawing-room, until
+she came to the rosewood table, surmounted by a phoenix palm. She pulled
+up the tablecloth and searched through the drawer. It contained
+card-counters, sockets for candles, a few scraps of wood detached from
+the furniture, two or three lustres belonging to the chandelier and a
+few photographs, among which she found only one of Chevalier, the
+earliest, showing him standing against a cloudy background.
+
+She searched for the other two in a little piece of Boule furniture
+which adorned the space between the windows, and on which were some
+Chinese lamps. Here slumbered lamp-globes of ground glass, lamp-shades,
+cut-glass goblets ornamented with gilt bronze, a match-stand in painted
+porcelain flanked by a child sleeping against a drum beside a dog, books
+whose bindings were detached, tattered musical scores, a couple of
+broken fans, a flute, and a small heap of carte-de-visite portraits.
+There she discovered a second Chevalier, the Don Cæsar de Bazan. The
+third was not there. She asked herself in vain where it could have been
+hidden away. Fruitlessly she hunted through boxes, bowls, flowerpot
+holders, and the music davenport. And while she was eagerly searching
+for the portrait, it was growing in size and distinctness in her
+imagination, attaining to a man's stature, was assuming a mocking air
+and defying her. Her head was on fire, her feet were like ice, and she
+could feel terror creeping into the pit of her stomach. Just as she was
+about to give up the search, about to go and bury her face in her
+pillow, she remembered that her mother kept some photographs in her
+mirror-panelled wardrobe. She again took courage. Softly she entered the
+room of the sleeping Madame Nanteuil. With silent steps she crept over
+to the wardrobe, opened it slowly and noiselessly, and, standing on a
+chair, explored the top shelf, which was loaded with old cardboard
+boxes. She came upon an album which dated from the Second Empire, and
+which had not been opened for twenty years. She rummaged among a mass of
+letters, of bundles of receipts and Mont-de-Piété vouchers. Awakened by
+the light of the candle and by the mouse-like noise made by the seeker,
+Madame Nanteuil demanded:
+
+"Who is there?"
+
+Immediately, perceiving the familiar little phantom in her long
+nightgown, with a heavy plait of hair down her back, perched on a chair,
+she exclaimed:
+
+"It's you, Félicie? You are not ill, are you? What are you doing there?"
+
+"I am looking for something."
+
+"In my wardrobe?"
+
+"Yes, mamma."
+
+"Will you kindly go back to your bed! You will catch cold. Tell me at
+least what you are looking for. If it's the chocolate, it is on the
+middle shelf next to the silver sugar-basin."
+
+But Félicie had seized upon a packet of photographs, which she was
+rapidly turning over. Her impatient fingers rejected Madame Doulce,
+bedecked with lace, Fagette, radiant, her hair dissolving in its own
+brilliance; Tony Meyer, with close-set eyes and a nose drooping over his
+lips; Pradel, with his flourishing beard; Trublet, bald and snub-nosed;
+Monsieur Bondois, with timorous eye and straight nose set above a heavy
+moustache. Although not in a mood to bestow any attention upon Monsieur
+Bondois, she gave him a passing glance of hostility, and by chance let a
+drop of candle-grease disfigure his nose.
+
+Madame Nanteuil, who was now wide awake, could make nothing of her
+proceedings.
+
+"Félicie, why on earth are you poking about in my wardrobe like that?"
+
+Félicie, who at last held the photograph for which she had sought so
+assiduously, responded only by a cry of fierce delight and flew from the
+chair, taking with her her dead friend, and, inadvertently, Monsieur
+Bondois as well.
+
+Returning to the drawing-room she crouched down by the fireplace, and
+made a fire of paper, into which she cast Chevalier's three photographs.
+She watched them blazing, and when the three bits of cardboard, twisted
+and blackened, had flown up the chimney, and neither shape nor substance
+was left, she breathed freely. She really believed, this time, that she
+had deprived the jealous dead man of the material of his apparitions,
+and had freed herself from the dreaded obsession.
+
+On picking up her candlestick she saw Monsieur Bondois, whose nose had
+disappeared beneath a round blob of white wax. Not knowing what to do
+with him she threw him with a laugh into the still flaming grate.
+
+Returning to her room she stood before the looking-glass and drew her
+nightgown closely about her, in order to emphasize the lines of her
+body. A thought which occasionally flitted through her mind tarried
+there this time a little longer than usual.
+
+She was wont to ask herself:
+
+"Why is one made like that, with a head, arms, legs, hands, feet, chest,
+and abdomen? Why is one made like that and not otherwise? It's funny."
+
+And at the moment the human form seemed to her arbitrary, fantastic,
+alien. But her astonishment was soon over. And, as she looked at
+herself, she felt pleased with herself. She was conscious of a keen
+deep-seated delight in herself. She bared her breasts, held them
+delicately in the hollow of her hands, looked at them tenderly in the
+glass, as if they were not a part of herself, but something belonging
+to her, like two living creatures, like a pair of doves.
+
+After smiling upon them, she went back to bed. Waking late in the
+morning she felt surprised for a moment at being alone in her bed.
+Sometimes, in a dream, she would divide herself into two beings, and,
+feeling her own flesh, she would dream that she was being caressed by a
+woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+The dress rehearsal of _La Grille_ was called for two o'clock. As early
+as one o'clock Dr. Trublet had taken his accustomed place in Nanteuil's
+dressing-room.
+
+Félicie, who was being dressed by Madame Michon, reproached her doctor
+with having nothing to say to her. Yet it was she who, preoccupied, her
+mind concentrated upon the part which she was about to play, was not
+listening to him. She gave orders that nobody should be allowed to come
+into her dressing-room. For all that, she received Constantin Marc's
+visit with pleasure, for she found him sympathetic.
+
+He was getting excited. In order to conceal his agitation he made a
+pretence of talking about his woods in the Vivarais, and began to tell
+shooting stories and peasants' tales, which he did not finish.
+
+"I am in a funk," said Nanteuil. "And you, Monsieur Marc, don't you feel
+qualms in the stomach?"
+
+He denied feeling any anxiety. She insisted:
+
+"Now confess that you wish it were all over."
+
+"Well, since you insist, perhaps I would rather it were over."
+
+Whereupon Dr. Socrates, with a simple expression and in a quiet voice,
+asked him the following question:
+
+"Do you not believe that what must be accomplished has already been
+accomplished, and has been accomplished from all time?"
+
+And without waiting for a reply he added:
+
+"If the world's phenomena reach our consciousness in succession, we must
+not conclude from that that they are really successive, and we have
+still fewer reasons to believe that they are produced at the moment when
+we perceive them."
+
+"That's obvious," said Constantin Marc, who had not listened.
+
+"The universe," continued the doctor, "appears to us perpetually
+imperfect, and we are all under the illusion that it is perpetually
+completing itself. Since we perceive phenomena successively, we actually
+believe that they follow one another. We imagine that those which we no
+longer see are in the past, and those which we do not yet see are in the
+future. But it is possible to conceive beings built in such fashion that
+they perceive simultaneously what we regard as the past and the future.
+We may conceive beings who perceive phenomena in a retrograde order,
+and see them unroll themselves from our future to our past. Animals
+disposing of space otherwise than ourselves, and able, for instance, to
+move at a speed greater than that of light, would conceive an idea of
+the succession of phenomena which would differ greatly from our own."
+
+"If only Durville is not going to rag me on the stage!" exclaimed
+Félicie, while Madame Michon was putting on her stockings under her
+skirt.
+
+Constantin Marc assured her that Durville did not even dream of any such
+thing, and begged her not to be uneasy.
+
+And Dr. Socrates resumed his discourse.
+
+"We ourselves, of a clear night, when we gaze at Spica Virginis, which
+is throbbing above the top of a poplar, can see at one and the same time
+that which was and that which is. And it may be said with equal truth
+that we see that which is and that which will be. For if the star, such
+as it appears to us, represents the past as compared with the tree, the
+tree constitutes the future as compared with the star. Yet the star,
+which, from afar, shows us its tiny, fiery countenance, not as it is
+to-day, but as it was in the time of our youth, perhaps even before our
+birth, and the poplar-tree, whose young leaves are trembling in the
+fresh night air, come together within us in the same moment of time, and
+to us are present simultaneously. We say of a thing that it is in the
+present when we have a precise perception of it. We say that it is in
+the past when we preserve but an indistinct image of it. A thing may
+have been accomplished millions of years ago, yet if it makes the
+strongest possible impression upon us it will not be for us a thing of
+the past; it will be present. The order in which things revolve in the
+depths of the universe is unknown to us. We know only the order of our
+perceptions. To believe that the future does not exist, because we do
+not know it, is like believing that a book is not finished because we
+have not finished reading it."
+
+The doctor paused for a moment. And Nanteuil, in the silence which
+followed, heard the sound of her heart beating. She exclaimed:
+
+"Continue, my dear Socrates, continue, I beg you. If you only knew how
+much good you do me by talking! You think that I am not listening to a
+word you say. But it distracts me to hear you talking of far-away
+things; it makes me feel that there is something else besides my
+entrance; it prevents me from giving way to the blues. Talk about
+anything you like, but do not stop."
+
+The wise Socrates, who had doubtless anticipated the benign influence
+which his speech was exerting over the actress, resumed his lecture:
+
+"The universe is constructed inevitably as a triangle of which two
+angles and one side are given. Future things are determined. They are
+from that moment finished. They are as if they existed. Indeed, they
+exist already. They exist to such a degree that we know them in part.
+And, if that part is infinitesimal in proportion to their immensity, it
+is none the less very appreciable in proportion to the part of
+accomplished things of which we can have any knowledge. It is
+permissible to say that, for us, the future is not much more obscure
+than the past. We know that generations will follow generations in
+labour, joy and suffering. I look beyond the duration of the human race.
+I see the constellations slowly changing in the heavens those forms of
+theirs which seem immutable; I see the Wain unharnessed from its ancient
+team, the shield of Orion broken in twain, Sirius extinguished. We know
+that the sun will rise to-morrow and that for a long time to come it
+will rise every morning amid the dense clouds or in light mists."
+
+Adolphe Meunier entered discreetly on tiptoe.
+
+The doctor grasped his hand warmly.
+
+"Good day, Monsieur Meunier. We can see next month's new moon. We do not
+see her as distinctly as to-night's new moon, because we do not know in
+what grey or ruddy sky she will reveal her old saucepan-lid over my
+roof, amid the stove-flues capped with pointed hats and romantic hoods,
+to the gaze of the amorous cats. But this coming rising of the moon--if
+we were expert enough to know it in advance, in its most minute
+particulars, every one of which is essential, we should conceive as
+clear an idea of the night whereof I speak as of the night now with us;
+both would be equally present to us.
+
+"The knowledge that we have of the facts is the sole reason which leads
+us to believe in their reality. We know that certain facts are bound to
+occur. We must therefore believe them to be real. And, if they are real,
+they are realized. It is therefore credible, my dear Constantin Marc,
+that your play has been played a thousand years ago, or half an hour
+ago, which comes absolutely to the same thing. It is credible that we
+have all been dead for some time past. Think it, and your mind will be
+at rest."
+
+Constantin Marc, who had paid scant attention to his remarks and who did
+not perceive their relevance or their propriety, answered, in a somewhat
+irritable tone, that all that was to be found in Bossuet.
+
+"In Bossuet!" exclaimed the indignant physician. "I challenge you to
+show me anything resembling it in his works. Bossuet knew nothing of
+philosophy."
+
+Nanteuil turned to the doctor. She was wearing a big lawn bonnet with a
+tall round coif; it was bound tightly upon her head with a wide blue
+ribbon, and its lappets, one above another, fell on either side of her
+face, shading her forehead and cheeks. She had transformed herself into
+a fiery blonde. Reddish-brown hair fell in curls about her shoulders. An
+organdie neckerchief was crossed over her bosom and held at the waist by
+a broad purple girdle. Her white and pink striped petticoat, which
+flowed as though wet and clinging from the somewhat high waist, made her
+appear very tall. She looked like a figure in a dream.
+
+"Delage, too," she said, "rags one in the most rotten way. Have you
+heard what he did to Marie-Claire? They were playing together in _Les
+Femmes savantes_. He put an egg into her hand, on the stage. She
+couldn't get rid of it until the end of the act."
+
+On hearing the call boy's summons she went downstairs, followed by
+Constantin Marc. They heard the roar of the house, the mutterings of the
+monster, and it seemed to them that they were entering into the flaming
+mouth of the apocalyptic beast.
+
+_La Grille_ was favourably received. Coming at the end of the season,
+with little hope of a long run, it found favour with all. By the middle
+of the first act the public were conscious of the style, the poetry,
+and, here and there, the obscurities of the play. Thenceforward they
+respected it, pretended to enjoy it, and wished they could understand
+it. They forgave the play its slight dramatic value. It was literary, and
+for once the style found acceptance.
+
+Constantin Marc as yet knew no one in Paris. He had invited to the
+theatre three or four landed proprietors from the Vivarais, who sat
+blushing in the stalls in their white ties, rolled their round eyes, and
+did not dare to applaud. As he had no friends nobody dreamt of spoiling
+his success. And even in the corridors there were those who set his
+talent above that of other dramatists. Greatly excited, nevertheless, he
+wandered from dressing-room to dressing-room or collapsed into a chair
+at the back of the director's stage-box. He was worrying about the
+critics.
+
+"Set your mind at rest," Romilly told him. "They will say of your play
+the good or bad things they think of Pradel. And for the time being they
+think more ill than good of him."
+
+Adolphe Meunier informed him, with a pale smile, that the house was a
+good one, and that the critics thought the play showed very careful
+writing. He expected, in return, a few complimentary words concerning
+his _Pandolphe et Clarimonde_. But it did not enter Constantin Marc's
+head to vouchsafe them.
+
+Romilly shook his head.
+
+"We must look forward to slatings. Monsieur Meunier knows it well. The
+press has shown itself ferociously unjust to him."
+
+"Alas," sighed Meunier, "they will never say as many hard things about
+us as were said of Shakespeare and Molière."
+
+Nanteuil had a great success which was marked less by vociferous calls
+before the curtain than by the deeper and more discreet approval of
+discriminating playgoers. She had revealed qualities with which she had
+not hitherto been credited; purity of diction, nobility of pose, and a
+proud, modest grace.
+
+On the stage, during the last interval, the Minister congratulated her
+in person. This was a sign that the public was favourably disposed, for
+Ministers never express individual opinions. Behind the Grand Master of
+the University pressed a flattering crowd of public officials, society
+folk, and dramatic authors. With arms extended toward her like
+pump-handles they all simultaneously assured her of their admiration.
+And Madame Doulce, stifled by their numbers, left on the buttons of the
+men's garments shreds of her countless adornments of cotton lace.
+
+The last act was Nanteuil's triumph. She obtained better things from the
+public than tears and shouts. She won from all eyes that moist yet
+tearless gaze, from every breast that deep yet almost silent murmur,
+which beauty alone has power to compel.
+
+She felt that she had grown immeasurably in a single instant, and when
+the curtain fell she whispered:
+
+"This time I've done it!"
+
+She was unrobing herself in her dressing-room, which was filled with
+baskets of orchids, bouquets of roses, and bunches of lilac, when a
+telegram was brought to her. She tore it open. It was a message from The
+Hague containing these words:
+
+"My heartfelt congratulations on your undoubted success--Robert."
+
+Just as she finished reading it Dr. Trublet entered the dressing-room.
+
+She flung her arms, burning with joy and fatigue, round his neck; she
+drew him to her warm moist bosom, and planted on his meditative
+Silenus-like face a smacking kiss from her intoxicated lips.
+
+Socrates, who was a wise man, took the kiss as a gift from the gods,
+knowing full well that it was not intended for him, but was dedicated to
+glory and to love.
+
+Nanteuil realized herself that in her intoxication she had perhaps
+charged her lips with too ardent a breath, for, throwing her arms apart,
+she exclaimed:
+
+"It can't be helped! I am so happy!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+At Easter an event of great importance increased her joy. She was
+engaged at the Comédie-Française. For some time past, without mentioning
+the subject, she had been trying for this engagement. Her mother had
+helped her in the steps she had taken. Madame Nanteuil was lovable now
+that she was loved. She now wore straight corsets and petticoats that
+she could display anywhere. She frequented the offices of the Ministry,
+and it is said that, being solicited by the deputy-chief of a department
+in the Beaux-Arts, she had yielded with very good grace. At least, so
+Pradel said.
+
+He would exclaim joyfully:
+
+"You wouldn't recognize her now, Mother Nanteuil! She has become most
+desirable, and I like her better than her little vixen of a daughter.
+She has a better disposition."
+
+Like the rest of them, Félicie had disdained, despised, disparaged the
+Comédie-Française. She had said, as all the others did: "I should
+hardly care to get into that house." And no sooner did she belong to it
+than she was filled with proud and joyful exultation. What increased her
+pleasure twofold was that she was to make her debut in _L'École des
+Femmes_. She already studying the part of Agnès with an obscure old
+professor, Monsieur Maxime, of whom she thought highly because he was
+acquainted with all the traditions of the stage. At night she was
+playing Cécile in _La Grille_, and she was living in a feverish turmoil
+of work she received a letter in which Robert de Ligny informed her that
+he was returning to Paris.
+
+During his stay at The Hague he had made certain experiments which had
+proved to him the strength of his love for Félicie. He had had women who
+were reported to be pretty and pleasing. But neither Madame Bourmdernoot
+of Brussels, tall and fresh looking, nor the sisters Van Cruysen,
+milliners on the Vijver, nor Suzette Berger of the Folies-Marigny, then
+on tour through Northern Europe, had given him a sense of pleasure in
+its completeness. When in their company he had regretted Félicie, and
+had discovered that of all women, he desired her alone. Had it not been
+for Madame Bourmdernoot, the sisters Van Cruysen, and Suzette
+Berger, he would never have known how priceless Félicie Nanteuil was to
+him. If one must be literal it may be argued that he was unfaithful to
+her. That is the correct expression. There are others which come to the
+same thing and which are not such good form. But if one looks into the
+matter more closely he had not deceived her. He had sought her, he had
+sought her out of herself and had learned that he would find her in
+herself alone. In his futile wisdom he was almost angered and alarmed;
+he was uneasy at having to stake the multitude of his desires upon so
+slender a substance, in so unique and fragile a vessel. And he loved
+Félicie all the more because he loved her with a certain depth of rage
+and hatred.
+
+On the very day of his arrival in Paris, he made an appointment with her
+in a bachelor's flat, which a rich colleague in the Ministry of Foreign
+Affairs had placed at his disposal. It was situated in the Avenue de
+l'Alma, on the ground-floor of an attractive-looking house, and
+consisted of a couple of small rooms hung with a design of suns with
+brown hearts and golden rays, which rose, uniform, peaceful, and
+shadowless on the cheerful wall. The rooms were modern in style; the
+furniture was of a pale green, decorated with flowering branches; its
+outlines followed the gentle curves of the liliaceous plants, and
+assumed something of the tender feeling of moist vegetation. The
+cheval-glass leant slightly forward in its frame of bulbous plants of
+supple form, terminating in closed corollas, and in this frame the
+mirror had the coolness of water. A white bearskin lay stretched at the
+foot of the bed.
+
+"You! You! It's you!" was all she could say.
+
+She saw the pupils of his eyes shining and heavy with desire, and while
+she gazed at him a cloud gathered before her eyes. The subtle fire of
+her blood, the burning of her loins, the warm breath of her lungs, the
+fiery colour of her face, were all blended in her mouth, and she pressed
+on her lover's lips a long, long kiss, a kiss pregnant with all these
+fires and as fresh as a flower in the dew.
+
+They asked one another twenty things at a time, and their questions
+intermingled.
+
+"Were you wretched, Robert, when you were away from me?"
+
+"So you are making your début at the Comédie?
+
+"Is The Hague a pretty place?"
+
+"Yes, a quiet little town. Red, grey, yellow houses, with stepped
+gables, green shutters, and geraniums at the windows."
+
+"What did you do there?"
+
+"Not much. I walked round the Vijver."
+
+"You did not go with women, I should hope?"
+
+"No, upon my word. How pretty you are, my darling! Are you well again
+now?"
+
+"Yes, I am cured."
+
+And in sudden entreaty she said:
+
+"Robert, I love you. Do not leave me. If you were to leave me I know for
+certain I could never take another lover. And what would become of me?
+You know that I can't do without love."
+
+He replied brusquely, in a harsh voice, that he loved her only too well,
+that he thought of nothing but of her.
+
+"I'm going crazy with it."
+
+His harshness delighted and reassured her better than the nerveless
+tenderness of oaths and promises could have done. She smiled and began
+to undress herself generously.
+
+"When do you make your début at the Comédie?"
+
+"This very month."
+
+She opened her little bag, and took from it, together with her
+face-powder, her call for the rehearsal, which she held out to Robert.
+It was a source of unending delight to her to gaze admiringly at this
+document, because it bore the heading of the Comédie, with the remote
+and awe-inspiring date of its foundation.
+
+"You see, I make my début as Agnès in _L'École des Femmes_."
+
+"It's a fine part."
+
+"I believe you."
+
+And, while she was undressing, the lines surged to her lips, and she
+whispered them:
+
+  "Moi, j'ai blessé quelqu'un? fis-je tout étonnée
+   Oui, dit-elle, blessé; mais blessé tout de bon;
+   Et c'est l'homme qu'hier vous vîtes au balcon
+   Las! qui pourrait, lui dis-je, en avoir été cause?
+   Sur lui, sans y penser, fis-je choir quelque chose?"
+
+"You see, I have not grown thin."
+
+  "Non, dit-elle, vos yeux ont fait ce coup fatal,
+   Et c'est de leurs regards qu'est venu tout son mal."
+
+"If anything, I am a little plumper, but not too much."
+
+  "Hé, mon Dieu! ma surprise est, fis-je, sans seconde;
+   Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"
+
+He listened to the lines with pleasure. If on the one hand he did not
+know much more of the literature of bygone days or of French tradition
+than his youthful contemporaries, he had more taste and more lively
+interests. And, like all Frenchmen, he loved Molière, understood him,
+and felt him profoundly.
+
+"It's delightful," he said. "Now, come to me."
+
+She let her chemise slip downwards with a calm and beneficent grace.
+But, because she wished to make herself desired, and because she loved
+comedy, she began Agnès' narrative:
+
+  "J'étais sur le balcon à travailler au frais,
+  Lorsque je vis passer sous les arbres d'auprès
+  Un jeune homme bien fait qui, rencontrant ma vue...."
+
+He called her, and drew her to him. She glided from his arms, and,
+advancing toward the mirror, she continued to recite and act before the
+glass.
+
+  "D'une humble révérence aussitôt me salue."
+
+Bending her knee, at first slightly, then lower, then, with her left leg
+brought forward, and her right thrown, back, she curtsied deeply.
+
+  "Moi, pour ne point manquer à la civilité,
+  Je fis la révérence aussi de mon côté."
+
+He called her more urgently. But she dropped a second curtsy, the pauses
+of which she accentuated with amusing precision. And she went on
+reciting and dropping curtsies at the places indicated by the text and
+by the traditions of the stage.
+
+  "Soudain il me refait une autre révérence;
+  Moi, j'en refais de même une autre en diligence;
+  Et lui, d'une troisième aussitôt repartant,
+  D'une troisième aussi j'y repars à l'instant."
+
+She executed every detail of stage business, seriously and
+conscientiously, taking pains to give a perfect rendering. Her poses,
+some of which were disconcerting, requiring as they did a skirt to
+explain them, were almost all pretty, while all were interesting,
+inasmuch as they brought into relief the firm muscles under the soft
+envelope of a young body, and revealed at every movement correspondences
+and harmonies which are not commonly observed.
+
+When clothing her nudity with the propriety of her attitudes and the
+ingenuousness of her expressions she was the incarnation, through mere
+chance and caprice, of a gem of art, an allegory of Innocence in the
+style of Allegrain or Clodion. And the great lines of the comedy rang
+out with delicious purity from this animated figurine. Robert,
+enthralled in spite of himself, suffered her to go on to the very end.
+What entertained him above all was that the most public of all things, a
+stage scene, should be presented to him in so private and secret a
+fashion. And, while watching the ceremonious actions of this girl in all
+her nudity, he was at the same time revelling in the philosophical
+pleasure of discovering how dignity is produced in the best social
+circles.
+
+  "Il passe, vient, repasse et toujours de plus belle
+   Me fait à chaque fois une révérence nouvelle,
+   Et moi qui tous ses tours fixement regardais,
+   Nouvelle révérence aussi je lui rendais...."
+
+In the meantime she admired in the mirror her freshly-budded breasts,
+her supple waist, her arms, a trifle slender, round and tapering, and
+her smooth, beautiful knees; and, seeing all this subservient to the
+fine art of comedy, she became animated and exalted; a slight flush,
+like rouge, tinted her cheeks.
+
+  "Tant que si sur ce point la nuit ne fût venue,
+  Toujours comme cela je me serais tenue,
+  Ne voulaut point céder, ni recevoir l'ennui
+  Qu'il me pût estimer moins civile que lui...."
+
+He called to her from the bed, where he was lying on his elbow.
+
+"Now come!"
+
+Whereupon, full of animation and with heightened colour, she exclaimed:
+
+"Don't you think that I, too, love you!"
+
+She flung herself beside her lover. Supple and wholly surrendered, she
+threw back her head, offering to his kisses her eyes veiled with shadowy
+lashes and her half-parted lips, from which gleamed a moist flash of
+white.
+
+Of a sudden she started to her knees. Her staring eyes were filled with
+unspeakable terror. A hoarse scream escaped from her throat, followed by
+a wail as long drawn out and gentle as an organ note. Turning her head,
+she pointed to the white fur spread out at the foot of the bed.
+
+"There! There! He is lying there like a crouching dog, with a hole in
+his head. He is looking at me, with the blood trickling from the corner
+of his mouth."
+
+Her eyes, wide open, rolled up, showing the whites. Her body stretched
+backward like a bow, and, when it had recovered its suppleness, she fell
+as if dead.
+
+He bathed her temples with cold water, and brought her back to
+consciousness. In a childlike voice she whimpered that every joint in
+her body was broken. Feeling a burning sensation in the hollow of her
+hand, she looked, and saw that the palm was cut and bleeding.
+
+She said:
+
+"It's my nails, they've gone into my hand. See, my nails are full of
+blood!"
+
+She thanked him tenderly for his ministrations, and apologized sweetly
+for causing him so much trouble.
+
+"It was not for that you came, was it?"
+
+She tried to smile, and looked around her.
+
+"It's nice, here."
+
+Her gaze met the call to rehearsal lying open on the bedside table, and
+she sighed:
+
+"What is the use of my being a great actress if I am not happy?"
+
+Without realizing it, she was repeating word for word what Chevalier
+had said when she rejected his advances.
+
+Then, raising her still stupefied head from the pillow in which it had
+lain buried, she turned her mournful eyes toward her lover, and said to
+him resignedly:
+
+"We did indeed love each other, we two. It is over. We shall never again
+belong to each other; no, never. He forbids it!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note:
+
+The following typographical errors in the source text were corrected:
+
+Page  92:  disease.               ->  disease."
+Page 103:  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont  ->  Saint-Étienne-du-Mont
+Page 104:  Saint-Êtienne-du-Mont  ->  Saint-Étienne-du-Mont
+Page 138:  dimunitive             ->  diminutive
+Page 141:  magificent             ->  magnificent
+Page 141:  Saint-Êtienne-du-Mont  ->  Saint-Étienne-du-Mont
+
+The following inconsistent hyphenations in the source text were left
+unchanged:
+
+ill-will/illwill
+fire-place/fireplace
+box-wood/boxwood]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Mummer's Tale, by Anatole France
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Mummer's Tale, by Anatole France
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Mummer's Tale, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Mummer's Tale
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Translator: Charles E. Roche
+
+Release Date: June 9, 2006 [EBook #18545]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MUMMER'S TALE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Verity White, Henry Craig and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 95%" />
+
+<h3>THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE</h3>
+<h3>IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION</h3>
+<h3>EDITED BY J. LEWIS MAY AND</h3>
+<h3>BERNARD MIALL</h3>
+
+<h1>A MUMMER'S TALE</h1>
+
+<h3>(HISTOIRE COMIQUE)</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 276px;">
+<img src="images/image1.jpg" width="276" height="250" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 33%" />
+
+<h1>A MUMMER'S TALE</h1>
+
+<h2>BY ANATOLE FRANCE</h2>
+
+<h3>A TRANSLATION BY</h3>
+<h3>CHARLES E. ROCHE</h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 305px;">
+<img src="images/image2.jpg" width="305" height="250" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>LONDON, JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD</h4>
+<h4>NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMXXI</h4>
+
+<p class="center" style="font-size: smaller">WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1"  width="60%" summary="contents">
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right" style="width: 15%">CHAPTER</td>
+<td align="right">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">I.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">II.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page21">21</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">III.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page26">26</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">IV.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page41">41</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">V.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page1">63</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">VI.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page71">71</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">VII.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page82">82</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">VIII.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page97">97</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">IX.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page108">108</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">X.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page137">137</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XI.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page166">166</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XII.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page176">176</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XIII.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page181">181</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XIV.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page186">186</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XV.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page194">194</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XVI.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page197">197</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XVII.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page205">205</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XVIIII.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page212">212</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XIX.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page220">220</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td align="right">XX.</td>
+<td align="right"><a href="#page230">230</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+
+<h3>A MUMMER'S TALE</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 33%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page1" id="page1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>A MUMMER'S TALE</h1>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+
+<p><img src="images/t1.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="T" alt="T" />he scene was an actress's dressing-room at the Od&eacute;on.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie Nanteuil, her hair powdered, with blue on her eyelids, rouge on
+her cheeks and ears, and white on her neck and shoulders, was holding
+out her foot to Madame Michon, the dresser, who was fitting on a pair of
+little black slippers with red heels. Dr. Trublet, the physician
+attached to the theatre, and a friend of the actress's, was resting his
+bald cranium on a cushion of the divan, his hands folded upon his
+stomach and his short legs crossed.</p>
+
+<p>"What else, my dear?" he inquired of her.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't know! Fits of suffocation; giddiness; and, all of a sudden,
+an agonizing pain, as if I were going to die. That's the worst of all."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you sometimes feel as though you must laugh or cry for no apparent
+reason, about nothing at all?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page2" id="page2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"That I cannot tell you, for in this life one has so many reasons for
+laughing or crying!"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you subject to attacks of dizziness?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. But, just think, doctor, at night, I see an imaginary cat, under
+the chairs or the table, gazing at me with fiery eyes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Try not to dream of cats any more," said Madame Michon, "because that's
+a bad omen. To see a cat is a sign that you'll be betrayed by friends,
+or deceived by a woman."</p>
+
+<p>"But it is not in my dreams that I see a cat! It's when I'm wide awake!"</p>
+
+<p>Trublet, who was in attendance at the Od&eacute;on once a month only, was given
+to looking in as a friend almost every evening. He was fond of the
+actresses, delighted in chatting with them, gave them good advice, and
+listened with delicacy to their confidences. He promised F&eacute;licie that he
+would write her a prescription at once.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll attend to the stomach, my dear child, and you'll see no more cats
+under the chairs and tables."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Michon was adjusting the actress's stays. The doctor, suddenly
+gloomy, watched her tugging at the laces.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't scowl," said F&eacute;licie. "I am never tight-laced. With my waist I
+should surely be a fool if I were." And she added, thinking of her
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page3" id="page3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+
+best friend in the theatre, "It's all very well for Fagette, who has no
+shoulders and no hips; she's simply straight up and down. Michon, you
+can pull a little tighter still. I know you are no lover of waists,
+doctor. Nevertheless, I cannot wear swaddling bands like those &aelig;sthetic
+creatures. Just slip your hand into my stays, and you'll see that I
+don't squeeze myself too tight."</p>
+
+<p>He denied that he was inimical to stays; he only condemned them when too
+tightly laced. He deplored the fact that women should have no sense of
+the harmony of line; that they should associate with smallness of the
+waist an idea of grace and beauty, not realizing that their beauty
+resided wholly in those modulations through which the body, having
+displayed the superb expansion of chest and bosom, tapers off gradually
+below the thorax, to glorify itself in the calm and generous width of
+the flanks.</p>
+
+<p>"The waist," he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that
+hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from
+one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you
+stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the
+breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a
+horrible furrow above the navel. The negresses, who file their teeth
+down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a wooden disc,
+disfigure themselves
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page4" id="page4">[Pg 4]</a></span>
+
+in a less barbarous fashion. For, after all, some
+feminine splendour still remains to a creature who wears rings in the
+cartilage of her nose, and whose lip is distended by a circular disc of
+mahogany as big as this pomade pot. But the devastation is complete when
+woman carries her ravages into the sacred centre of her empire."</p>
+
+<p>Dwelling upon a favourite subject, he enumerated one by one the
+deformities of the bones and muscles caused by the wearing of stays, in
+terms now fanciful, now precise, now droll, now lugubrious.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil laughed as she listened. She laughed because, being a woman,
+she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty;
+because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and
+actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her
+of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a
+caricature. Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted in
+her own young body as she pictured to herself all these indignities of
+the flesh. With a ringing laugh she crossed the dressing-room towards
+the doctor, dragging with her Madame Michon, who was holding on to her
+stay-laces as though they were reins, with the look of a sorceress being
+whisked away to a witches' sabbath.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be afraid!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>And she objected that peasant women,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page5" id="page5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+
+who never wore stays, had far
+worse figures than town-bred women.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor bitterly inveighed against the Western civilizations because
+of their contempt for and ignorance of natural beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Trublet, born within the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, had gone as a young
+man to practise in Cairo. He brought back from that city a little money,
+a liver complaint, and a knowledge of the various customs of humanity.
+When at a ripe age, he returned to his own country, he rarely strayed
+from his ancient Rue de Seine, thoroughly enjoying his life, save that
+it depressed him a trifle to see how little able his contemporaries were
+to realize the deplorable misunderstandings which for eighteen centuries
+had kept humanity at cross-purposes with nature.</p>
+
+<p>There was a tap at the door.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only me!" exclaimed a woman's voice in the passage.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie, slipping on her pink petticoat, begged the doctor to open the
+door.</p>
+
+<p>Enter Madame Doulce, a lady who was allowing her massive person to run
+to seed, although she had long contrived to hold it together on the
+boards, compelling it to assume the dignity proper to aristocratic
+mothers.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear! How-d'ye-do, doctor!
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page6" id="page6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+
+F&eacute;licie, you know I am not one to
+pay compliments. Nevertheless, I saw you the day before yesterday, and I
+assure you that in the second of <i>La M&egrave;re confidente</i> you put in some
+excellent touches, which are far from easy to bring off."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil, with smiling eyes, waited&mdash;as is always the case when one has
+received a compliment&mdash;for another.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce, thus invited by Nanteuil's silence, murmured some
+additional words of praise:</p>
+
+<p>"...excellent touches, genuinely individual business!"</p>
+
+<p>"You really think so, Madame Doulce? Glad to hear it, for I don't feel
+the part. And then that great Perrin woman upsets me altogether. It is a
+fact. When I sit on the creature's knees, it makes me feel as if&mdash;&mdash;You
+don't know all the horrors that she whispers into my ear while we are on
+the stage! She's crazy! I understand everything, but there are some
+things which disgust me. Michon, don't my stays crease at the back, on
+the right?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child," cried Trublet with enthusiasm, "you have just said
+something that is really admirable."</p>
+
+<p>"What?" inquired Nanteuil simply.</p>
+
+<p>"You said: 'I understand everything, but there are some things which
+disgust me.' You understand everything; the thoughts and actions of men
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page7" id="page7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+
+appear to you as particular instances of the universal mechanics, but in
+respect of them you cherish neither hatred nor anger. But there are
+things which disgust you; you have a fastidious taste, and it is
+profoundly true that morals are a matter of taste. My child, I could
+wish that the Academy of Moral Science thought as sanely as you. Yes.
+You are quite right. As regards the instincts which you attribute to
+your fellow-actress, it is as futile to blame her for them as to blame
+lactic acid for being an acid possessing mixed properties."</p>
+
+<p>"What are you talking about?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am saying that we can no longer assign praise or blame to any human
+thought or action, once the inevitable nature of such thoughts and
+actions has been proved for us."</p>
+
+<p>"So you approve of the morals of that gawk of a Perrin, do you? You, a
+member of the Legion of Honour! A nice thing, to be sure!"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor heaved himself up.</p>
+
+<p>"My child," he said, "give me a moment's attention; I am going to tell
+you an instructive story:</p>
+
+<p>"In times gone by, human nature was other than it is to-day. There were
+then not men and women only, but also hermaphrodites; in other words,
+beings in whom the two sexes were combined. These three kinds of human
+beings possessed four arms, four legs, and two faces. They
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page8" id="page8">[Pg 8]</a></span>
+
+were robust
+and rotated rapidly on their own axes, just like wheels. Their strength
+inspired them with audacity to war with the gods, therein following the
+example of the Giants, Jupiter, unable to brook such insolence&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Michon, doesn't my petticoat hang too low on the left?" asked Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"Resolved," continued the doctor, "to render them less strong and less
+daring. He divided each into two, so that they had now but two arms, two
+legs, and one head apiece, and thenceforward the human race became what
+it is to-day. Consequently, each of us is only the half of a human
+being, divided from the other half, just as one divides a sole into two
+portions. These halves are ever seeking their other halves. The love
+which we experience for one another is nothing but an invisible force
+impelling us to reunite our two halves in order to re-establish
+ourselves in our pristine perfection. Those men who result from the
+divisions of hermaphrodites love women; those women who have a similar
+origin love men. But the women who proceed from the division of
+primitive women do not bestow much attention upon men, but are drawn
+toward their own sex. So do not be astonished when you see&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you invent that precious story, doctor?" inquired Nanteuil, pinning
+a rose in her bodice.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page9" id="page9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The doctor protested that he had not invented a word of it. On the
+contrary, he had, he said, left out part of the story.</p>
+
+<p>"So much the better?" exclaimed Nanteuil. "For I must tell you that the
+person who did invent it is not particularly brilliant."</p>
+
+<p>"He is dead," remarked Trublet.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil once more expressed her disgust of her fellow-actress, but
+Madame Doulce, who was prudent and occasionally took <i>d&eacute;jeuner</i> with
+Jeanne Perrin, changed the subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my darling, so you've got the part of Ang&eacute;lique. Only remember
+what I told you: your gestures should be somewhat restrained, and you
+yourself a little stiff. That is the secret of the <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>. Beware of
+your charming natural suppleness. Young girls in a 'stock' piece ought
+to be just a trifle doll-like. It's good form. The costume requires it.
+You see, F&eacute;licie, what you must do above all, when you are playing in
+<i>La M&egrave;re confidente</i>, which is a delightful play&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," interrupted F&eacute;licie, "so long as I have a good part, I don't care
+a fig for the play. Besides, I am not particularly in love with
+Marivaux&mdash;&mdash;What are you laughing at, doctor? Have I put my foot in it?
+Isn't <i>La M&egrave;re confidente</i> by Marivaux?"</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure it is!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page10" id="page10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, then? You are always trying to muddle me. I was saying that
+Ang&eacute;lique gets on my nerves. I should prefer a part with more meat in
+it, something out of the ordinary. This evenings especially, the part
+gives me the creeps."</p>
+
+<p>"All the more likely that you'll do well in it, my pet," said Madame
+Doulce. "We never enter more thoroughly into our parts than when we do
+so by main force, and in spite of ourselves. I could give you many
+examples. I myself, in <i>La Vivandi&egrave;re d'Austerlitz</i>, staggered the house
+by my gaiety of tone, when I had just been informed that my Doulce, so
+great an artist and so good a husband, had had an epileptic fit in the
+orchestra at the Od&eacute;on, just as he was picking up his cornet."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do they insist on my being nothing but an <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>?" inquired
+Nanteuil, who wanted to play the woman in love, the brilliant coquette,
+and every part a woman could play.</p>
+
+<p>"That is quite natural," persisted Madame Doulce. "Comedy is an
+imitative art; and you imitate an art all the better for not feeling it
+yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"Do not delude yourself, my child," said the doctor to F&eacute;licie. "Once an
+<i>ing&eacute;nue</i>, always an <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>. You are born an Ang&eacute;lique or a Dorine, a
+C&eacute;lim&egrave;ne or a Madame Pernelle. On the stage, some women are always
+twenty, others are always
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page11" id="page11">[Pg 11]</a></span>
+
+thirty, others again are always sixty. As for
+you, Mademoiselle Nanteuil, you will always be eighteen, and you will
+always be an <i>ing&eacute;nue</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I am quite content with my work," replied Nanteuil, "but you cannot
+expect me to play all <i>ing&eacute;nues</i> with the same pleasure. There is one
+part, for example, which I long to play, and that is Agn&egrave;s in <i>L'&Eacute;cole
+des femmes</i>."</p>
+
+<p>At the mere mention of the name of Agn&egrave;s, the doctor murmured
+delightedly from among his cushions:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"</p>
+
+<p>"Agn&egrave;s, that's a part if you like!" exclaimed Nanteuil. "I have asked
+Pradel to give it me."</p>
+
+<p>Pradel, the manager of the theatre, was an ex-comedian, a wideawake,
+genial fellow, who had got rid of his illusions and nourished no
+exaggerated hopes. He loved peace, books and women. Nanteuil had every
+reason to speak well of Pradel, and she referred to him without any
+feeling of ill will, and with frank directness.</p>
+
+<p>"It was shameful, disgusting, rotten of him," she said. "He wouldn't let
+me play Agn&egrave;s and gave the part to Falempin. I must say, though, that
+when I asked him I didn't go the right way about it. While she knows how
+to tackle him, if you like! But what do I care! If Pradel doesn't let
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page12" id="page12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+
+me play Agn&egrave;s, he can go to the deuce, and his dirty Punch and Judy show
+too!"</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce continued to lavish her unheeded precepts. She was an
+actress of merits but she was old and worn out, and no longer obtained
+any engagements. She gave advice to beginners, wrote their letters for
+them, and thus, in the morning or evenings earned what was almost every
+day her only meal.</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor," asked F&eacute;licie, while Madame Michon was fastening a black
+velvet ribbon round her neck: "You say that my fits of dizziness are due
+to my stomach. Are you sure of that?"</p>
+
+<p>Before Trublet could answer, Madame Doulce exclaimed that fits of
+dizziness always proceeded from the stomach, and that two or three hours
+after meals she experienced a feeling of distension in hers, and she
+thereupon asked the doctor for a remedy.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie, however, was thinking, for she was capable of thought.</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question, which you
+may possibly think a droll one; but I do really want to know whether,
+considering that you know just what there is in the human body, and that
+you have seen all the things we have inside us, it doesn't embarrass
+you, at certain moments, in your dealings with women?
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page13" id="page13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+
+It seems to me
+that the idea of all that must disgust you."</p>
+
+<p>From the depths of his cushions Trublet, wafting a kiss to F&eacute;licie,
+replied:</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, there is no more exquisitely delicate, rich, and
+beautiful tissue than the skin of a pretty woman. That is what I was
+telling myself just now, while contemplating the back of your neck, and
+you will readily understand that, under such an impression&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She made a grimace at him like that of a disdainful monkey.</p>
+
+<p>"You think it witty, I suppose, to talk nonsense when anyone asks you a
+serious question?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, since you wish it, mademoiselle, you shall have an
+instructive answer. Some twenty years ago we had, in the post-mortem
+room at the H&ocirc;pital Saint-Joseph, a drunken old watchman, named Daddy
+Rousseau, who every day at eleven o'clock used to lunch at the end of
+the table on which the corpse was lying. He ate his lunch because he was
+hungry. Nothing prevents people who are hungry from eating as soon as
+they have got something to eat. Only Daddy Rousseau used to say: 'I
+don't know whether it is because of the atmosphere of the room, but I
+must have something fresh and appetizing.'"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page14" id="page14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I understand," said F&eacute;licie. "Little flower-girls are what you want.
+But you mustn't, you know. And there you are seated like a Turk and you
+haven't written out my prescription yet." She cast an inquiring glance
+at him. "Where is the stomach exactly?"</p>
+
+<p>The door had remained ajar. A young man, a very pretty fellow and
+extremely fashionable, pushed it open, and, having taken a couple of
+steps into the dressing-room, inquired politely whether he might come
+in.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it's you!" said Nanteuil. And she stretched out her hand, which he
+kissed with pleasure, ceremony and fatuity.</p>
+
+<p>"How are you, Doctor Socrates?" he inquired, without wasting any
+particular courtesies on Madame Doulce.</p>
+
+<p>Trublet was often accosted in this manner, because of his snub-nose and
+his subtle speech. Pointing to Nanteuil, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur de Ligny, you see before you a young lady who is not quite
+sure whether she has a stomach. It is a serious question. We advise her
+to refer, for the answer, to the little girl who ate too much jam. Her
+mother said to her: 'You will injure your stomach.' The child replied:
+'It's only ladies who have stomachs; little girls haven't any.'"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page15" id="page15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Heavens, how silly you are, doctor!" cried Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"I would you spoke the truth, mademoiselle. Silliness is the capacity
+for happiness. It is the sovereign content. It is the prime asset in a
+civilized society."</p>
+
+<p>"You are paradoxical, my dear doctor," remarked Monsieur de Ligny. "But
+I grant you that it is better to be silly as everybody is silly than to
+be clever as no one else is clever."</p>
+
+<p>"It's true, what Robert says!" exclaimed Nanteuil, sincerely impressed.
+And she added thoughtfully: "At any rate, doctor, one thing is certain.
+It is that stupidity often prevents one from doing stupid things. I have
+noticed that many a time. Whether you take men or women, those are not
+the most stupid who act the most stupidly. For example, there are
+intelligent women who are stupid about men."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean those who cannot do without them."</p>
+
+<p>"There's no hiding anything from you, my little Socrates."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," sighed the big Doulce, "what a terrible slavery it is! Every woman
+who cannot control her senses is lost to art."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil shrugged her pretty shoulders, which still retained something
+of the angularity of youth.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my great-grandmother! Don't try to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page16" id="page16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+
+kid the youngsters! What an
+idea! In your days, did actresses control their&mdash;how did you put it?
+Fiddlesticks! They didn't control them a scrap!"</p>
+
+<p>Noticing that Nanteuil's temper was rising, the bulky Doulce retired
+with dignity and prudence. Once in the passage, she vouchsafed a further
+word of advice:</p>
+
+<p>"Remember, my darling, to play Ang&eacute;lique as a 'bud.' The part requires
+it."</p>
+
+<p>But Nanteuil, her nerves on edge, took no notice.</p>
+
+<p>"Really," she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, "she makes
+me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have
+forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells
+one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her
+husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he
+tumbled into his cornet. As for her lovers, magnificent men, just ask
+Madame Michon. Why, in less than two years she made mere shadows of
+them, mere puffs of breath. That's the way she controlled them! And
+supposing anyone had told her that she was lost to art!"</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Trublet extended his two hands, palms outward, towards Nanteuil, as
+though to stop her.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not excite yourself, my child. Madame
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page17" id="page17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+
+Doulce is sincere. She used
+to love men, now she loves God. One loves what one can, as one can, and
+with what one has. She has become chaste and pious at the fitting age.
+She is diligent in the practices of her religion: she goes to Mass on
+Sundays and feast days, she&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she is right to go to Mass," asserted Nanteuil "Michon, light a
+candle for me, to heat my rouge. I must do my lips again. Certainly, she
+is quite right to go to Mass, but religion does not forbid one to have a
+lover."</p>
+
+<p>"You think not?" asked the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"I know my religion better than you, that's certain!"</p>
+
+<p>A lugubrious bell sounded, and the mournful voice of the call-boy was
+heard in the corridors:</p>
+
+<p>"The curtain-raiser is over!"</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil rose, and slipped over her wrist a velvet ribbon ornamented
+with a steel medallion. Madame Michon was on her knees arranging the
+three Watteau pleats of the pink dress, and, with her mouth full of
+pins, delivered herself from one corner of her lips of the following
+maxim:</p>
+
+<p>"There is one good thing in being old, men cannot make you suffer any
+more."</p>
+
+<p>Robert de Ligny took a cigarette from his case.</p>
+
+<p>"May I?" And he moved toward the lighted candle on the dressing-table.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page18" id="page18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil, who never took her eyes off him, saw beneath his moustache,
+red and light as flame, his lips, ruddy in the candlelight, drawing in
+and puffing out the smoke. She felt a slight warmth in her ears.
+Pretending to look among her trinkets, she grazed Ligny's neck with her
+lips, and whispered to him:</p>
+
+<p>"Wait for me after the show, in a cab, at the corner of the Rue de
+Tournon."</p>
+
+<p>At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the
+corridor. The actors in the curtain-raiser were returning to their
+dressing-rooms.</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor, pass me your newspaper."</p>
+
+<p>"It is highly uninteresting, mademoiselle."</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, pass it over."</p>
+
+<p>She took it and held it like a screen above her head.</p>
+
+<p>"The light makes my eyes ache," she observed.</p>
+
+<p>It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a
+headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her
+blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her
+grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart,
+it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and
+she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.</p>
+
+<p>While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall,
+lean young man entered the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page19" id="page19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+
+dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His
+melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow's beak; his
+mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam's apple of his long throat
+made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.</p>
+
+<p>"That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?" gaily inquired Dr.
+Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a
+special liking for Chevalier.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in, everybody!" cried Nanteuil "This isn't a dressing-room; it's a
+mill."</p>
+
+<p>"My respects, none the less, Mme. Miller!" replied Chevalier, "I warn
+you, there's a pack of idiots out in front. Would you believe it&mdash;they
+shut me up!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's no reason for walking in without knocking," replied Nanteuil
+snappishly.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor pointed out that Monsieur de Ligny had left the door open;
+whereupon Nanteuil, turning to Ligny, said in a tone of tender reproach:</p>
+
+<p>"Did you really leave the door open? But, when one comes into a room,
+one closes the door on other people: it is one of the first things one
+is taught."</p>
+
+<p>She wrapped herself in a white blanket-cloak.</p>
+
+<p>The call-boy summoned the players to the stage.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page20" id="page20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She grasped the hand which Ligny offered her, and, exploring his wrist
+with her fingers, dug her nail into the spot, close to the veins, where
+the skin is tender. Then she disappeared into the dark corridor.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page21" id="page21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/c.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="C" alt="C" />hevalier, having resumed his ordinary clothes, sat in a corner box,
+beside Madame Doulce, gazing at F&eacute;licie, a small remote figure on the
+stage. And remembering the days when he had held her in his arms, in his
+attic in the Rue des Martyrs, he wept with grief and rage.</p>
+
+<p>They had met last year at a f&ecirc;te given under the patronage of Lecureuil,
+the deputy; a benefit performance given in aid of poor actors of the
+ninth <i>arrondissement</i>. He had prowled around her, dumb, famishing, and
+with blazing eyes. For a whole fortnight he had pursued her incessantly.
+Cold and unmoved, she had appeared to ignore him. Then, suddenly, she
+surrendered; so suddenly that when he left her that day, still radiant
+and amazed, he had said a stupid thing. He had told her: "And I took you
+for a little bit of china!" For three whole months he had tasted joys
+acute as pain. Then F&eacute;licie had grown elusive, remote, and estranged.
+She loved him no longer. He sought the reason, but could not discover
+it. It tortured him
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page22" id="page22">[Pg 22]</a></span>
+
+to know that he was no longer loved; jealousy
+tortured him still more. It was true that in the first beautiful hours
+of his love he had known that F&eacute;licie had a lover, one Girmandel, a
+court bailiff, who lived in the Rue de Provence, and he had felt it
+deeply. But as he never saw him he had formed so confused and
+ill-defined an idea of him that his jealousy lost itself in uncertainty.
+F&eacute;licie assured him that she had never been more than passive in her
+intercourse with Girmandel, that she had not even pretended to care for
+him. He believed her, and this belief gave him the keenest satisfaction.
+She also told him that for a long time past, for months, Girmandel had
+been nothing more than a friend, and he believed her. In short, he was
+deceiving the bailiff, and it was agreeable to him to feel that he
+enjoyed this advantage. He had learned also that F&eacute;licie, who was just
+finishing her second year at the Conservatoire, had not denied herself
+to her professor. But the grief which he had felt because of this was
+softened by a time-honoured and venerable custom. Now Robert de Ligny
+was causing him intolerable suffering. For some time past he had found
+him incessantly dangling about her. He could not doubt that she loved
+Robert; and although he sometimes told himself that she had not yet
+given herself to this man, it was not that he believed it, but merely
+that
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page23" id="page23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+
+he was fain sometimes to mitigate the bitterness of his
+sufferings.</p>
+
+<p>Mechanical applause broke out at the back of the theatre, and a few
+members of the orchestra, murmuring inaudibly, clapped their hands
+slowly and noiselessly. Nanteuil had just given her last reply to Jeanne
+Perrin.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Brava! Brava!</i> She is delightful, dear little woman!" sighed Madame
+Doulce.</p>
+
+<p>In his jealous anger, Chevalier was disloyal. Lifting a finger to his
+forehead, he remarked:</p>
+
+<p>"She plays with <i>that</i>." Then, placing his hand upon his heart, he
+added: "It is with this that one should act."</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks, dear friend, thanks!" murmured Madame Doulce, who read into
+these maxims an obvious eulogy of herself.</p>
+
+<p>She was, indeed, in the habit of asserting that all good acting comes
+from the heart; she maintained that, to give full expression to a
+passion, it was necessary to experience it, and to feel in one's own
+person the expressions that one wished to represent. She was fond of
+referring to herself as an example of this. When appearing as a tragedy
+queen, after draining a goblet of poison on the stage, her bowels had
+been on fire all night. Nevertheless she was given to saying: "The
+dramatic art is an imitative art, and one imitates an emotion all
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page24" id="page24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+
+the better for not having experienced it." And to illustrate this maxim she
+drew yet further examples from her triumphant career.</p>
+
+<p>She gave a deep sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"The child is admirably gifted. But she is to be pitied; she has been
+born into a bad period. There is no longer a public nowadays; no
+critics, no plays, no theatres, no artists. It is a decadence of art."</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"No need to pity her," he said. "She will have all that she can wish;
+she will succeed; she will be wealthy. She is a selfish little jade, and
+a woman who is selfish can get anything she likes. But for people with
+hearts there's nothing left but to hang a stone round one's neck and
+throw oneself into the river. But, I too, I shall go far. I, too, shall
+climb high. I, too, will be a selfish hound."</p>
+
+<p>He got up and went out without waiting for the end of the play. He did
+not return to F&eacute;licie's dressing-room for fear of meeting Ligny there,
+the sight of whom was insupportable, and because by avoiding it he could
+pretend to himself that Ligny had not returned thither.</p>
+
+<p>Conscious of physical distress on going away from her, he took five or
+six turns under the dark, deserted arcades of the Od&eacute;on, went down the
+steps into the night, and turned up the Rue de
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page25" id="page25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+
+M&eacute;dicis. Coachmen were
+dozing on their boxes, while waiting for the end of the performance, and
+high over the tops of the plane-trees the moon was racing through the
+clouds. Treasuring in his heart an absurd yet soothing remnant of hope,
+he went, this night, as on other nights, to wait for F&eacute;licie at her
+mother's flat.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page26" id="page26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/m.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="44" title="M" alt="M" />adame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth
+story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened
+upon the garden of the Luxembourg. She gave Chevalier a friendly
+welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved F&eacute;licie, and
+because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle
+the fact that he had been her daughter's lover.</p>
+
+<p>She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was
+burning in the stove. In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with
+golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall. They were hung
+about a woman's cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of
+tin-plate; a piece of armour which F&eacute;licie had worn last winter, while
+still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc
+at the house of a spiritualistic duchess. An officer's widow and the
+mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean,
+treasured these trophies.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page27" id="page27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"F&eacute;licie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier. I don't expect her before
+midnight. She is on the stage till the end of the play."</p>
+
+<p>"I know; I was in the first piece. I left the theatre after the first
+act of <i>La M&egrave;re confidente</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Monsieur Chevalier, why didn't you stay till the end? My daughter
+would have been so pleased if you had waited. When one is acting one
+likes to have friends in the house."</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier replied ambiguously:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, as to friends, there are plenty of those about."</p>
+
+<p>"You are mistaken, Monsieur Chevalier; good friends are scarce. Madame
+Doulce was there, of course? Was she pleased with F&eacute;licie?" And she
+added, with great humility: "I should indeed be happy if she could
+really make a hit. It is so difficult to come to the fore in her
+profession, for a girl who is alone, without support, without influence!
+And it is so necessary for her to succeed, poor child!"</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier did not feel disposed to lavish any pity upon F&eacute;licie. With a
+shrug of the shoulders he replied bluntly:</p>
+
+<p>"No need to worry about that. She'll get on. She is an actress heart and
+soul. She has it in her bones, down to her very legs."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil indulged in a quiet smile.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page28" id="page28">[Pg 28]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Poor child! They are not very plump, her legs. F&eacute;licie's health is not
+bad, but she must not overdo it. She often has fits of giddiness, and
+sick headaches."</p>
+
+<p>The servant came in to place on the table a dish of fried sausage, a
+bottle of wine, and a few plates.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Chevalier was searching in his mind for some appropriate
+fashion of asking a question which had been on the tip of his tongue
+ever since he had set foot on the stairs. He wanted to know whether
+F&eacute;licie was still meeting Girmandel, whose name he never heard mentioned
+nowadays. We are given to conceiving desires which suit themselves to
+our condition. Now, in the misery of his existence, in the distress of
+his heart, he was full of an eager desire that F&eacute;licie, who loved him no
+longer, should love Girmandel, whom she loved but little, and he hoped
+with all his heart that Girmandel would keep her for him, would possess
+her wholly, and leave nothing of her for Robert de Ligny. The idea that
+the girl might be with Girmandel appeased his jealousy, and he dreaded
+to learn that she had broken with him.</p>
+
+<p>Of course he would never have allowed himself to question a mother as to
+her daughter's lovers. But it was permissible to speak of Girmandel to
+Madame Nanteuil, who saw nothing that was other
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page29" id="page29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+
+than respectable in the
+relations of her household with the Government official, who was
+well-to-do, married, and the father of two charming daughters. To bring
+Girmandel's name into the conversation he had only to resort to a
+stratagem. Chevalier hit upon one which he thought was ingenious.</p>
+
+<p>"By the way," he remarked, "I saw Girmandel just now in a carriage."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil made no comment.</p>
+
+<p>"He was driving down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in a cab. I certainly
+thought I recognized him. I should be greatly surprised if it wasn't
+he."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil made no comment.</p>
+
+<p>"His fair beard, his high colour&mdash;he's an easy man to recognize,
+Girmandel."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil made no comment.</p>
+
+<p>"You were very friendly with him at one time, you and F&eacute;licie. Do you
+still see him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Girmandel? Oh yes, we still see him," replied Madame Nanteuil
+softly.</p>
+
+<p>These words made Chevalier feel almost happy. But she had deceived him;
+she had not spoken the truth. She had lied out of self-respect, and in
+order not to reveal a domestic secret which she regarded as derogatory
+to the honour of her family. The truth was that, being carried away by
+her passion for Ligny, F&eacute;licie had given Girmandel the go-by, and he,
+being a man of the world, had promptly cut
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page30" id="page30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+
+off supplies. Madame
+Nanteuil, despite her years, had resumed an old lover, out of her love
+for her child, that she might not want for anything. She had renewed her
+former liaison with Tony Meyer, the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy.
+Tony Meyer was a poor substitute for Girmandel; he was none too free
+with his money. Madame Nanteuil, who was wise and knew the value of
+things, did not complain on that account, and she was rewarded for her
+devotion, for, in the six weeks during which she had been loved anew,
+she had grown young again.</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier, following up his idea, inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"You would hardly say that Girmandel was still a young man, would you?"</p>
+
+<p>"He is not old," said Madame Nanteuil. "A man is not old at forty."</p>
+
+<p>"A bit used up, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, dear no," replied Madame Nanteuil, quite calmly.</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier became thoughtful and was silent. Madame Nanteuil began to
+nod. Then, being aroused from her somnolence by the servant, who brought
+in the salt-cellar and the water-bottle, she inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"And you, Monsieur Chevalier, is all well with you?"</p>
+
+<p>No, all was not well with him. The critics were
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page31" id="page31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+
+out to "down" him. And
+the proof that they had combined against him was that they all said the
+same thing; they said his face lacked expression.</p>
+
+<p>"My face lacking in expression!" he cried indignantly. "They should have
+called it a predestined face. Madame Nanteuil, I aim high, and it is
+that which does me harm. For example, in <i>La Nuit du 23 octobre</i>, which
+is being rehearsed now, I am Florentin: I have only six lines; it's a
+washout. But I have increased the importance of the character
+enormously. Durville is furious. He deliberately crabs all my effects."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil, placid and kindly, found words to comfort him.
+Obstacles there were, no doubt, but in the end one overcame them. Her
+own daughter had fallen foul of the ill-will of certain critics.</p>
+
+<p>"Half-past twelve!" said Chevalier gloomily. "F&eacute;licie is late."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil supposed that she had been detained by Madame Doulce.</p>
+
+<p>"Madame Doulce as a rule undertakes to see her home, and you know she
+never hurries herself."</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier rose, as if to take his leave, to show that he remembered his
+manners. Madame Nanteuil begged him to stay.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't go; F&eacute;licie won't be long now. She
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page32" id="page32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+
+will be pleased to find you
+here. You will have supper with her."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil dozed off again in her chair. Chevalier sat gazing in
+silence at the clock hanging on the wall, and as the hand travelled
+across the dial he felt a burning wound in his heart, which grew bigger
+and bigger, and each little stroke of the pendulum touched him to the
+quick, lending a keener eye to his jealousy, by recording the moments
+which F&eacute;licie was passing with Ligny. For he was now convinced that they
+were together. The stillness of the night, interrupted only by the
+muffled sound of the cabs bowling along the boulevard, gave reality to
+the thoughts and images which tortured him. He could see them.</p>
+
+<p>Awakened with a start by the sound of singing on the pavement below,
+Madame Nanteuil returned to the thought with which she had fallen
+asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I am always telling F&eacute;licie; one mustn't be discouraged.
+One should not lose heart. We all have our ups and downs in life."</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier nodded acquiescence.</p>
+
+<p>"But those who suffer," he said, "only get what they deserve. It needs
+but a moment to free oneself from all one's troubles. Isn't it so?"</p>
+
+<p>She admitted the fact; certainly there were such things as sudden
+opportunities, especially on the stage.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page33" id="page33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Heaven knows," he continued in a deep, brooding voice, "it's not the
+stage I am worrying about. I know I shall make a name for myself one
+day, and a big one. But what's the good of being a great artist if one
+isn't happy? There are stupid worries which are terrible! Pains that
+throb in your temples with strokes as even and as regular as the ticking
+of that clock, till they drive you mad!"</p>
+
+<p>He ceased speaking; the gloomy gaze of his deep-set eyes fell upon the
+trophy hanging on the wall. Then he continued:</p>
+
+<p>"These stupid worries, these ridiculous sufferings, if one endures them
+too long, it simply means that one is a coward."</p>
+
+<p>And he felt the butt of the revolver which he always carried in his
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil listened to him serenely, with that gentle determination
+not to know anything, which had been her one talent in life.</p>
+
+<p>"Another dreadful thing," she observed, "is to decide what to have to
+eat. F&eacute;licie is sick of everything. There's no knowing what to get for
+her."</p>
+
+<p>After that, the flagging conversation languished, drawn out into
+detached phrases, which had no particular meaning. Madame Nanteuil, the
+servant, the coke fire, the lamp, the plate of sausage, awaited F&eacute;licie
+in depressing silence. The clock struck one.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page34" id="page34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+Chevalier's suffering had by this time attained the serenity of a flood
+tide. He was now certain. The cabs were not so frequent and their wheels
+echoed more loudly along the street. The rumbling of one of these cabs
+suddenly ceased outside the house. A few seconds later he heard the
+slight grating of a key in the lock, the slamming of the door, and light
+footsteps in the outer room.</p>
+
+<p>The clock marked twenty-three minutes past one. He was suddenly full of
+agitation, yet hopeful. She had come! Who could tell what she would say?
+She might offer the most natural explanation of her late arrival.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie entered the room, her hair in disorder, her eyes shining, her
+cheeks white, her bruised lips a vivid red; she was tired, indifferent,
+mute, happy and lovely, seeming to guard beneath her cloak, which she
+held wrapped about her with both hands, some remnant of warmth and
+voluptuous pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"I was beginning to be worried," said her mother. "Aren't you going to
+unfasten your cloak?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm hungry," she replied. She dropped into a chair before the little
+round table. Throwing her cloak over the back of the chair, she revealed
+her slender figure in its little black schoolgirl's dress, and, resting
+her left elbow on the oil-cloth table-cover, she proceeded to stick her
+fork into the sliced sausage.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page35" id="page35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Did everything go off well to-night?" asked Madame Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"Quite well."</p>
+
+<p>"You see Chevalier has come to keep you company. It is kind of him,
+isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Chevalier! Well, let him come to the table."</p>
+
+<p>And, without replying further to her mother's questions, she began to
+eat, greedy and charming, like Ceres in the old woman's house. Then she
+pushed aside her plate, and leaning back in her chair, with half-closed
+eyes, and parted lips, she smiled a smile that was akin to a kiss.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil, having drunk her glass of mulled wine, rose to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"You will excuse me, Monsieur Chevalier, I have my accounts to bring up
+to date."</p>
+
+<p>This was the formula which she usually employed to announce that she was
+going to bed.</p>
+
+<p>Left alone with F&eacute;licie, Chevalier said to her angrily:</p>
+
+<p>"I know I'm a fool and a groveller; but I'm going mad for love of you.
+Do you hear, F&eacute;licie?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should think I do hear. You needn't shout like that!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's ridiculous, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it's not ridiculous, it's&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page36" id="page36">[Pg 36]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She did not complete the sentence.</p>
+
+<p>He drew nearer to her, dragging his chair with him.</p>
+
+<p>"You came in at twenty-five minutes past one. It was Ligny who saw you
+home, I know it. He brought you back in a cab, I heard it stop outside
+the house."</p>
+
+<p>As she did not reply, he continued:</p>
+
+<p>"Deny it, if you can!"</p>
+
+<p>She remained silent, and he repeated, in an urgent, almost appealing
+tone:</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me he didn't!"</p>
+
+<p>Had she been so inclined, she might, with a phrase, with a single word,
+with a tiny movement of head or shoulders, have rendered him perfectly
+submissive, and almost happy. But she maintained a malicious silence.
+With compressed lips and a far-off look in her eyes, she seemed as
+though lost in a dream.</p>
+
+<p>He sighed hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>"Fool that I was, I didn't think of that! I told myself you would come
+home, as on other nights, with Madame Doulce, or else alone. If I had
+only known that you were going to let that fellow see you home!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what would you have done, had you known it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should have followed you, by God!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page37" id="page37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She stared at him with hard, unnaturally bright eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"That I forbid you to do! Understand me! If I learn that you have
+followed me, even once, I'll never see you again. To begin with, you
+haven't the right to follow me. I suppose I am free to do as I like."</p>
+
+<p>Choking with astonishment and anger, he stammered:</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't the right to? Haven't the right to? You tell me I haven't the
+right?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, you haven't the right! Moreover, I won't have it." Her face assumed
+an expression of disgust. "It's a mean trick to spy on a woman, if you
+once try to find out where I'm going, I'll send you about your business,
+and quickly at that."</p>
+
+<p>"Then," he murmured, thunderstruck, "we are nothing to each other, I am
+nothing to you. We have never belonged to each other. But see, F&eacute;licie,
+remember&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>But she was losing patience:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what do you want me to remember?"</p>
+
+<p>"F&eacute;licie, remember that you gave yourself to me!"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear boy, you really can't expect me to think of that all day. It
+wouldn't be proper."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her for a while, more in curiosity
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page38" id="page38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+
+than in anger, and said
+to her, half bitterly, half gently:</p>
+
+<p>"They may well call you a selfish little jade! Be one, F&eacute;licie, be one,
+as much as you like! What does it matter, since I love you? You are
+mine; I am going to take you back; I am going to take you back, and keep
+you. Think! I can't go on suffering for ever, like a poor dumb beast.
+Listen. I'll start with a clean slate. Let us begin to love one another
+over again. And this time it will be all right. And you'll be mine for
+good, mine only. I am an honest man; you know that. You can depend on
+me. I'll marry you as soon as I've got a position."</p>
+
+<p>She gazed at him with disdainful surprise. He believed that she had
+doubts as to his dramatic future, and, in order to banish them, he said,
+erect on his long legs:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you believe in my star, F&eacute;licie? You are wrong. I can feel that I
+am capable of creating great parts. Let them only give me a part, and
+they'll see. And I have in me not only comedy, but drama, tragedy&mdash;yes,
+tragedy. I can deliver verse properly. And that is a talent which is
+becoming rare in these days. So don't imagine, F&eacute;licie, that I am
+insulting you when I offer you marriage. Far from it! We will marry
+later on, as soon as it is possible and suitable. Of
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page39" id="page39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+
+course, there is
+no need for hurry. Meanwhile, we will resume our pleasant habits of the
+Rue des Martyrs. You remember, F&eacute;licie; we were so happy there! The bed
+wasn't wide, but we used to say: "That doesn't matter." I have now two
+fine rooms in the Rue de la Montagne-Saint-Genevi&egrave;ve, behind
+Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont. Your portrait hangs on every wall. You will find
+there the little bed of the Rue des Martyrs. Listen to me, I beg of you:
+I have suffered too much; I will not suffer any longer. I demand that
+you shall be mine, mine only."</p>
+
+<p>While he was speaking, F&eacute;licie had taken from the mantelpiece the pack
+of cards with which her mother played every night, and was spreading
+them out on the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Mine only. You hear me, F&eacute;licie."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't disturb me, I am busy with a game of patience."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen to me, F&eacute;licie. I won't have you receiving that fool in your
+dressing-room."</p>
+
+<p>Looking at her cards she murmured:</p>
+
+<p>"All the blacks are at the bottom of the pack."</p>
+
+<p>"I say that fool. He is a diplomatist, and nowadays the Ministry of
+Foreign Affairs is the refuge of incompetents." Raising his voice, he
+continued: "F&eacute;licie, for your own sake, as well as for mine, listen to
+me!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page40" id="page40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Well, don't shout, then. Mama is asleep."</p>
+
+<p>He continued in muffled tones:</p>
+
+<p>"Just get it into your head that I don't intend that Ligny shall be your
+lover."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her spiteful little face, and replied:</p>
+
+<p>"And if he is my lover?"</p>
+
+<p>He moved a step closer to her, raising his chair, gazing at her with the
+eye of a madman, and laughing a cracked laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"If he is your lover, he won't be so for long."</p>
+
+<p>And he dropped the chair.</p>
+
+<p>Now she was alarmed. She forced herself to smile.</p>
+
+<p>"You know very well I'm joking!"</p>
+
+<p>She succeeded without much difficulty in making him believe that she had
+spoken thus merely to punish him, because he was getting unbearable. He
+became calmer. She then informed him that she was tired out, that she
+was dropping with sleep. At last he decided to go home. On the landing
+he turned, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"F&eacute;licie, I advise you, if you wish to avoid a tragedy, not to see Ligny
+again."</p>
+
+<p>She cried through the half-open door:</p>
+
+<p>"Knock on the window of the porter's lodge, so that he can let you
+out!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page41" id="page41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/i.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="I" alt="I" />n the dark auditorium large linen sheets protected the balcony and the
+boxes. The orchestra was covered with a huge dust-cloth, which, being
+turned back at the edges, left room for a few human figures,
+indistinctly seen in the gloom: actors, scene-shifters, costumiers,
+friends of the manager, mothers and lovers and actresses. Here and there
+shone a pair of eyes from the black recesses of the boxes.</p>
+
+<p>They were rehearsing, for the fifty-sixth time, <i>La Nuit du 23 octobre
+1812</i>, a celebrated drama, dating twenty years back, which had not as
+yet been performed in this theatre. The actors knew their parts, and the
+following day had been chosen for that last private rehearsal which on
+stages less austere than that of the Od&eacute;on is known as "the dressmakers'
+rehearsal."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil had no part in the play. But she had had business at the
+theatre that day, and, as she had been informed that Marie-Claire was
+execrable
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page42" id="page42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+
+in the part of General Malet's wife, she had come to have a
+peep at her, concealed in the depths of a box.</p>
+
+<p>The great scene of the second act was about to begin. The stage setting
+represented an attic in the private asylum where the conspirator was
+confined in 1812. Durville, who filled the part of General Malet, had
+just made his entrance. He was rehearsing in costume: a long blue
+frock-coat, with a collar reaching above his ears, and riding-breeches
+of chamois leather. He had even gone so far as to make up his face for
+the part, the clean-shaven soldierly face of the general of the Empire,
+ornamented with the "hare's-foot" whiskers which were handed down by the
+victors of Austerlitz to their sons, the bourgeois of July. Standing
+erect, his right elbow resting in his left hand, his brow supported by
+his right hand, his deep voice and his tight-fitting breeches expressed
+his pride.</p>
+
+<p>"Alone, and without funds, from the depths of a prison, to attack this
+colossus, who commands a million soldiers, and who causes all the
+peoples and kings of Europe to tremble. Well, this colossus shall fall
+crashing to the ground."</p>
+
+<p>From the back of the stage old Maury, who was playing the conspirator
+Jacquemont, delivered his reply:</p>
+
+<p>"He may crush us in his downfall."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page43" id="page43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Suddenly cries at once plaintive and angry arose from the orchestra.</p>
+
+<p>The author was exploding. He was a man of seventy, brimming over with
+youth.</p>
+
+<p>"What do I see there at the back of the stage? It's not an actor, it's a
+fire-place. We shall have to send for the bricklayers, the
+marble-workers, to move it. Maury, do get a move on, confound you!"</p>
+
+<p>Maury shifted his position.</p>
+
+<p>"He may crush us in his downfall. I realize that it will not be your
+fault, General. Your proclamation is excellent. You promise them a
+constitution, liberty, equality. It is Machiavellian."</p>
+
+<p>Durville replied:</p>
+
+<p>"And in the best sense. An incorrigible breed, they are making ready to
+violate the oaths that they have not yet taken, and, because they lie,
+they believe themselves Machiavellis. What will you do with absolute
+power, you simpletons?"</p>
+
+<p>The strident voice of the author ground out:</p>
+
+<p>"You are right off the track, Dauville."</p>
+
+<p>"I?" asked the astonished Durville.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you, Dauville, you do not understand a word of what you are
+saying."</p>
+
+<p>In order to humiliate them, "to take them down a peg," this man who, in
+the whole course of his life, had never forgotten the name of a
+dairy-woman
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page44" id="page44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+
+or a hall-porter, disdained to remember the names of the
+most illustrious actors.</p>
+
+<p>"Dauville, my friend, just do that over again for me."</p>
+
+<p>He could play every part well. Jovial, funereal, violent, tender,
+impetuous, affectionate, he assumed at will a deep or a piping voice; he
+sighed, he roared, he laughed, he wept. He could transform himself, like
+the man in the fairy-tale, into a flame, a river, a woman, a tiger.</p>
+
+<p>In the wings the actors exchanged only short and meaningless phrases.
+Their freedom of speech, their easy morals, the familiarity of their
+manners did not prevent their retaining so much of hypocrisy as is
+needful, in any assemblage of men, if people are to look upon one
+another without feelings of horror and disgust. There even prevailed, in
+this workshop in full activity, a seemly appearance of harmony and
+union, a oneness of feeling created by the thought, lofty or
+commonplace, of the author, a spirit of order which compelled all
+rivalries and all illwill to transform themselves into goodwill and
+harmonious co-operation.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil, sitting in her box, felt uneasy at the thought that Chevalier
+was close at hand. For the last two days, since the night on which he
+had uttered his obscure threats, she had not seen him again and the fear
+with which he had inspired her
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page45" id="page45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+
+still possessed her. "F&eacute;licie, if you
+wish to prevent a tragedy, I advise you not to see Ligny again." What
+did those words portend? She pondered deeply over Chevalier. This young
+fellow, who, only two days earlier, had seemed to her commonplace and
+insignificant, of whom she had seen a good deal too much, whom she knew
+by heart&mdash;how mysterious and full of secrets he now appeared to her! How
+suddenly it had dawned upon her that she did not know him! Of what was
+he capable? She tried to guess. What was he going to do? Probably
+nothing. All men who are thrown over by a woman utter threats and do
+nothing. But was Chevalier a man quite like all the rest? People did say
+that he was crazy. That was mere talk. But she herself did not feel sure
+that there might not be a spark of insanity in him. She was studying him
+now with genuine interest. Highly intelligent herself, she had never
+discovered any great signs of intelligence in him; but he had on several
+occasions astonished her by the obstinacy of his will. She could
+remember his performing acts of the fiercest energy. Jealous by nature,
+there were yet certain matters which he understood. He knew what a woman
+is compelled to do in order to win a place on the stage, or to dress
+herself properly; but he could not endure to be deceived for the sake of
+love. Was
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page46" id="page46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+
+he the sort of man to commit a crime, to do something
+dreadful? That was what she could not decide. She recalled his mania for
+handling firearms. When she used to visit him in the Rue des Martyrs,
+she always found him in his room, taking an old shot-gun to pieces and
+cleaning it. And yet he never went shooting. He boasted of being a dead
+shot, and carried a revolver on his person. But what did that prove?
+Never before had she thought so much about him.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil was tormenting herself in this fashion in her box, when Jenny
+Fagette came to join her there; Jenny Fagette, slender and fragile, the
+incarnation of Alfred de Musset's Muse, who at night wore out her eyes
+of periwinkle-blue by scribbling society notes and fashion articles. A
+mediocre actress, but a clever and wonderfully energetic woman, she was
+Nanteuil's most intimate friend. They recognized in each other
+remarkable qualities, qualities which differed from those which each
+discovered in herself, and they acted in concert as the two great Powers
+of the Od&eacute;on. Nevertheless, Fagette was doing her best to take Ligny
+away from her friend; not from inclination, for she was insensible as a
+stick and held men in contempt, but with the idea that a liaison with a
+diplomatist would procure her certain advantages, and above all, in
+order not to miss the opportunity of doing something
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page47" id="page47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+
+scandalous. Nanteuil was aware of this. She knew that all her sister-actresses,
+Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, were
+trying to take Ligny from her. She had seen Louise Dalle, who dressed
+like a music-mistress, and always had the air of being about to storm an
+omnibus, and retained, even in her provocations and accidental contacts,
+the appearance of incurable respectability, pursue Ligny with her lanky
+legs, and beset him with the glances of a poverty-stricken Pasiphae. She
+had also surprised the oldest actress of the theatre, their excellent
+mother Ravaud, in a corridor, baring, at Ligny's approach, all that was
+left to her, her magnificent arms, which had been famous for forty
+years.</p>
+
+<p>Fagette, with disgust, and the tip of a gloved finger, called Nanteuil's
+attention to the scene through which Durville, old Maury and
+Marie-Claire were struggling.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at those people. They look as if they were playing at the
+bottom of thirty fathoms of water."</p>
+
+<p>"It's because the top lights are not lit."</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit of it. This theatre always looks as if it were at the bottom
+of the sea. And to think that I, too, in a moment, have to enter that
+aquarium. Nanteuil, you must not stop longer than one season in this
+theatre. One is drowned in it. But look at them, look at them!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page48" id="page48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Durville was becoming almost ventriloqual in order to seem more solemn
+and more virile:</p>
+
+<p>"Peace, the abolition of the combined martial and civil law, and of
+conscription, higher pay for the troops; in the absence of funds, a few
+drafts on the bank, a few commissions suitably distributed, these are
+infallible means."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce entered the box. Unfastening her cloak with its pathetic
+lining of old rabbit-skin, she produced a small dog's-eared book.</p>
+
+<p>"They are Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'s letters," she said. "You know that next
+Sunday I am going to give a reading of the best of Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;'s
+letters."</p>
+
+<p>"Where?" asked Fagette.</p>
+
+<p>"Salle Renard."</p>
+
+<p>It must have been some remote and little known hall, for Nanteuil and
+Fagette had not heard of it.</p>
+
+<p>"I am giving this reading for the benefit of the three poor orphans left
+by Lacour, the actor, who died so sadly of consumption this winter. I am
+counting on you, my darlings, to dispose of some tickets for me."</p>
+
+<p>"All the same, she really is ridiculous, Marie-Claire!" said Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>Some one scratched at the door of the box. It was Constantin Marc, the
+youthful author of a play,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page49" id="page49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+
+<i>La Grille</i>, which the Od&eacute;on was going to
+rehearse immediately; and Constantin Marc, although a countryman living
+in the forest, could henceforth breathe only in the theatre. Nanteuil
+was to take the principal part in the play. He gazed upon her with
+emotion, as the precious amphora destined to be the receptacle of his
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile Durville continued hoarsely:</p>
+
+<p>"If our France can be saved only at the price of our life and honour, I
+shall say, with the man of '93: 'Perish our memory!'"</p>
+
+<p>Fagette pointed her finger at a bloated youth, who was sitting in the
+orchestra, resting his chin on his walking-stick.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't that Baron Deutz?"</p>
+
+<p>"Need you ask!" replied Nanteuil. "Ellen Midi is in the cast. She plays
+in the fourth act. Baron Deutz has come to display himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Just wait a minute, my children; I have a word to say to that
+ill-mannered cub. He met me yesterday in the Place de la Concorde, and
+he didn't bow to me."</p>
+
+<p>"What, Baron Deutz? He couldn't have seen you!"</p>
+
+<p>"He saw me perfectly well. But he was with his people. I am going to
+have him on toast. Just you watch, my dears."</p>
+
+<p>She called him very softly:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page50" id="page50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Deutz! Deutz!"</p>
+
+<p>The Baron came towards her, smiling and well-pleased with himself, and
+leaned his elbows on the edge of the box.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, Monsieur Deutz, when you met me yesterday, were you in very
+bad company that you did not raise your hat to me?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her in astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"I? I was with my sister."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>On the stage, Marie-Claire, hanging upon Durville's neck, was
+exclaiming:</p>
+
+<p>"Go! Victorious or defeated, in good or evil fortune, your glory will be
+equally great. Come what may, I shall know how to show myself the wife
+of a hero."</p>
+
+<p>"That will do, Madame Marie-Claire!" said Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>Just at that moment Chevalier made his entry, and immediately the
+author, tearing his hair, let loose a flood of imprecations:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you call that an entry? It's a tumble, a catastrophe, a cataclysm!
+Ye gods! A meteor, an aerolith, a bit of the moon falling on to the
+stage would be less horribly disastrous! I will take off my play!
+Chevalier, come in again, my good fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>The artist who had designed the costumes,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page51" id="page51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+
+Michel, a fair young man with
+a mystic's beard, was seated in the first row, on the arm of a stall. He
+leaned over and whispered into the ear of Roger, the scene-painter:</p>
+
+<p>"And to think it's the fifty-sixth time that he's dropped on Chevalier
+with the same fury!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you know, Chevalier is rottenly bad," replied Roger, without
+hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't that he is bad," returned Michel indulgently. "But he always
+seems to be laughing, and nothing could be worse for a comedy actor. I
+knew him when he was quite a kid, at Montmartre. At school his masters
+used to ask him: 'Why are you laughing?' He was not laughing; he had no
+desire to laugh; he used to get his ears boxed from morning to night.
+His parents wanted to put him in a chemical factory. But he had dreams
+of the stage, and spent his days on the Butte Montmartre, in the studio
+of the painter Montalent. Montalent at that time was working day and
+night on his <i>Death of Saint Louis</i>, a huge picture which was
+commissioned for the cathedral of Carthage. One day, Montalent said to
+him&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"A little less noise!" shouted Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>"Said to him: 'Chevalier, since you have nothing to do, just sit for
+Philippe the Bold.' 'With pleasure,' said Chevalier. Montalent told him
+to assume the attitude of a man bowed down with
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page52" id="page52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+
+grief. More, he stuck
+two tears as big as spectacle lenses on his cheeks. He finished his
+picture, forwarded it to Carthage, and had half a dozen bottles of
+champagne sent up. Three months later he received from Father Cornemuse,
+the head of the French Missions in Tunis, a letter informing him that
+his painting of the <i>Death of Saint Louis</i>, having been submitted to the
+Cardinal-Archbishop, had been refused by His Eminence, because of the
+unseemly expression on the face of Philippe the Bold who was laughing as
+he watched the saintly King, his father, dying on a bed of straw.
+Montalent could not make head or tail of it; he was furious, and wanted
+to take proceedings against the Cardinal-Archbishop. His painting was
+returned to him; he unpacked it, gazed at it in gloomy silence, and
+suddenly shouted: 'It's true&mdash;Philippe the Bold appears to be splitting
+his sides with laughter. What a fool I have been! I gave him the head of
+Chevalier, who always seems to be laughing, the brute!'"</p>
+
+<p>"Will you be quiet there!" yelled Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>And the author exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Pradel, my dear boy, just pitch all those people into the street."</p>
+
+<p>Indefatigable, he was arranging the scene:</p>
+
+<p>"A little farther, Trouville, there. Chevalier, you walk up to the
+table, you pick up the documents
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page53" id="page53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+
+one by one, and you say:
+'Senatus-Consultum. Order of the day. Despatches to the departments.
+Proclamation,' Do you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Master. 'Senatus-Consultum. Order of the day. Despatches to the
+departments. Proclamation.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Marie-Claire, my child, a little more life, confound it! Cross
+over! That's it! Very good. Back again! Good! Very good! Buck up! Ah,
+the wretched woman! She's spoiling it all!"</p>
+
+<p>He called the stage manager.</p>
+
+<p>"Romilly, give us a little more light, one can't see an inch. Dauville,
+my dear friend, what are you doing there in front of the prompter's box!
+You seem glued to it! Just get into your head, once for all, that you
+are not the statue of General Malet, that you are General Malet in
+person, that my play is not a catalogue of wax-work figures, but a
+living moving tragedy, one which brings the tears into your eyes, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Words failed him, and he sobbed for a long while into his handkerchief.
+Then he roared:</p>
+
+<p>"Holy thunder! Pradel! Romilly! Where is Romilly? Ah, there he is, the
+villain! Romilly, I told you to put the stove nearer the dormer-window.
+You have not done so. What are you thinking of, my friend?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page54" id="page54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The rehearsal was suddenly brought to a standstill by a serious
+difficulty. Chevalier, the bearer of documents on which hung the fate of
+the Empire, was to escape from his prison by the dormer-window. The
+stage "business" had not yet been settled; it had been impossible to do
+so before the setting of the stage was completed. It was now discovered
+that the measurements had been wrongly taken, and the dormer-window was
+not accessible.</p>
+
+<p>The author leapt on to the stage.</p>
+
+<p>"Romilly, my friend, the stove is not in the place fixed on. How can you
+expect Chevalier to get out through the dormer-window? Push the stove to
+the right at once."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm willing enough," said Romilly, "but we shall be blocking up the
+door."</p>
+
+<p>"What's that? We shall be blocking up the door?"</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely."</p>
+
+<p>The manager of the theatre, the stage-manager, the scene-shifters stood
+examining the stage-setting with gloomy attention, while the author held
+his peace.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry, Master," said Chevalier. "There's no need to change
+anything. I shall be able to jump out all right."</p>
+
+<p>Climbing on to the stove, he did indeed succeed in grasping the sill of
+the window, and in hoisting
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page55" id="page55">[Pg 55]</a></span>
+
+himself up until his elbows rested on it, a
+feat that had seemed impossible.</p>
+
+<p>A murmur of admiration rose from the stage, the wings, and the house.
+Chevalier had produced an astonishing impression by his strength and
+agility.</p>
+
+<p>"Splendid!" exclaimed the author. "Chevalier, my friend, that is
+perfect. The fellow is as nimble as a monkey. I'll be hanged if any of
+you could do as much. If all the parts were in such good hands as that
+of Florentin, the play would be lauded to the skies."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil, in her box, almost admired him. For one brief second he had
+seemed to her more than man, both man and gorilla, and the fear with
+which he had inspired her was immeasurably increased. She did not love
+him; she had never loved him; she did not desire him; it was a long time
+since she had really wanted him; and, for some days past, she had been
+unable to imagine herself taking pleasure in any other than Ligny; but
+had she at that moment found herself alone with Chevalier she would have
+felt powerless, and she would have sought to appease him by her
+submission as one appeases a supernatural power.</p>
+
+<p>On the stage, while an Empire <i>salon</i> was being lowered from the flies,
+through all the noise of the running gear and the grounding of the
+supports, the author held the whole of the company, as well
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page56" id="page56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+
+as all the
+supers, in the hollow of his hand, and at the same time gave them all
+advice, or illustrated what he wanted of them.</p>
+
+<p>"You, the big woman, the cake-seller, Madame Ravaud, haven't you ever
+heard the women calling in the Champs-&Eacute;lys&eacute;es: 'Eat your fill, ladies!
+This way for a treat!' It is <i>sung</i>. Just learn the tune by to-morrow.
+And you, drummer-boy, just give me your drum; I'm going to teach you how
+to beat the roll, confound it! Fagette, my child, what the mischief are
+you doing at a ball given by the Minister of Police, if you haven't any
+stockings with golden clocks? Take off those knitted woollen stockings
+immediately. This is the very last play that I shall produce in this
+theatre. Where is the colonel of the 10th cohort? So it's you? Well
+then, my friend, your soldiers march past like so many pigs. Madame
+Marie-Claire, come forward a little, so that I may teach you how to
+curtsy."</p>
+
+<p>He had a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and arms and legs everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>In the house, Romilly was shaking hands with Monsieur Gombaut, of the
+Academy of Moral Sciences, who had dropped in as a neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>"You may say what you will, Monsieur Gombaut, it is perhaps not accurate
+as far as facts are concerned, but it's drama."</p>
+
+<p>"Malet's conspiracy," replied Monsieur Gombaut,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page57" id="page57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+
+"remains, and will
+doubtless remain for a long time to come, an historical enigma. The
+author of this drama has taken advantage of those points which are
+obscure in order to introduce dramatic elements. But what, to my
+thinking, is beyond a doubt, is that General Malet, although associated
+with Royalists, was himself a Republican, and was working for the
+re-establishment of popular Government. In the course of his examination
+during the trial, he pronounced a sublime and profound utterance. When
+the presiding judge of the court-martial asked him: 'Who were your
+accomplices?' Malet replied: 'All France, and you yourself, had I
+succeeded.'"</p>
+
+<p>Leaning on the edge of Nanteuil's box, an aged sculptor, as venerable
+and as handsome as an ancient satyr, was gazing with glistening eye and
+smiling lips at the stage, which at that moment was in a state of
+commotion and confusion.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you pleased with the play, Master?" Nanteuil asked him.</p>
+
+<p>And the Master, who had no eyes for anything but bones, tendons and
+muscles, replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, indeed, mademoiselle; yes, indeed! I see over there a little
+creature, little Midi, whose shoulder attachment is a jewel."</p>
+
+<p>He outlined it with his thumb. Tears welled up into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page58" id="page58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Chevalier asked if he might enter the box. He was happy, less on account
+of his prodigious success than at seeing F&eacute;licie. He dreamed, in his
+infatuation, that she had come for his sake, that she loved him, that
+she was returning to him.</p>
+
+<p>She feared him, and, as she was timid, she flattered him.</p>
+
+<p>"I congratulate you, Chevalier. You were simply astounding. Your exit is
+a marvel. You can take my word for it. I am not the only one to say so.
+Fagette thought you were wonderful."</p>
+
+<p>"Really?" asked Chevalier.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of the happiest moments of his life.</p>
+
+<p>A shrieking voice issued from the deserted heights of the third
+galleries, sounding through the house like the whistle of a locomotive.</p>
+
+<p>"One can't hear a word you say, my children; speak louder and pronounce
+your words distinctly!"</p>
+
+<p>The author appeared, infinitely small, in the shadow of the dome.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon the utterance of the players who were collected at the front
+of the stage, around a naphtha flare, rose more distinctly:</p>
+
+<p>"The Emperor will allow the troops to rest for some weeks at Moscow;
+then with the rapidity of an eagle he will swoop down upon St.
+Petersburg."</p>
+
+<p>"Spades, clubs, trump, two points to me."</p>
+
+<p>"There we shall spend the winter, and next
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page59" id="page59">[Pg 59]</a></span>
+
+spring we shall penetrate
+into India, crossing Persia, and the British power will be a thing of
+the past."</p>
+
+<p>"Thirty-six in diamonds."</p>
+
+<p>"And I the four aces."</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, gentlemen, what say you to the Imperial decree concerning
+the actors of Paris, dated from the Kremlin? There's an end of the
+squabbles between Mademoiselle Mars and Mademoiselle Leverd."</p>
+
+<p>"Do look at Fagette," said Nanteuil. "She is charming in that blue
+Marie-Louise dress trimmed with chinchilla."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce brought out from under her furs a stack of tickets already
+soiled through having been too frequently offered.</p>
+
+<p>"Master," she said, addressing Constantin Marc, "you know that next
+Sunday I am to give a reading, with appropriate remarks, of the best
+letters of Madame de S&eacute;vign&eacute;, for the benefit of the three poor orphans
+left by Lacour, the actors who died this winter in so deplorable a
+fashion."</p>
+
+<p>"Had he any talent?" asked Constantin Marc.</p>
+
+<p>"None whatever," said Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, in what way is his death deplorable?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Master," sighed Madame Doulce, "do not pretend to be unfeeling."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page60" id="page60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I am not pretending to be unfeeling. But here is something that
+surprises me: the value which we set upon the lives of those who are not
+of the slightest interest to us. We seem as though we believe that life
+is in itself something precious. Yet nature teaches us plainly enough
+that nothing is more worthless and contemptible. In former days people
+were less besmeared with sentimentalism. Each of us held his own life to
+be infinitely precious, but he did not profess any respect whatever for
+the life of others. We were nearer to nature in those days. We were
+created to devour one another. But our debilitated, enervated,
+hypocritical race wallows in a sly cannibalism. While we are gulping one
+another down we declare that life is sacred, and we no longer dare to
+confess that life is murder."</p>
+
+<p>"That life is murder," echoed Chevalier dreamily, without grasping the
+meaning of the words.</p>
+
+<p>Then he poured forth a string of nebulous ideas:</p>
+
+<p>"Murder and bloodshed, that may be! But amusing bloodshed, and comical
+murder. Life is a burlesque catastrophe, a terrible comedy, the mask of
+carnival over blood-stained cheeks. That is what life means to the
+artist; the artist on the stage, and the artist in action."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil uneasily sought a meaning in these confused phrases.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page61" id="page61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The actor continued excitedly:</p>
+
+<p>"Life is yet another thing: it is the flower and the knife, it is to see
+red one day and blue the next, it is hatred and love, ravishing,
+delightful hatred, cruel love."</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Chevalier," asked Constantin Marc in the quietest of tones,
+"does it not seem to you natural to be a murderer, and do you not think
+that it is merely the fear of being killed that prevents us from
+killing?"</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier replied in deep, pensive tones:</p>
+
+<p>"Most certainly not! It would not be the fear of being killed that would
+prevent me from killing. I have no fear of death. But I feel a respect
+for the life of others. I am humane in spite of myself. I have for some
+time past been seriously considering the question which you have just
+asked me, Monsieur Constantin Marc. I have pondered over it day and
+night, and I know now that I could not kill any one.'"</p>
+
+<p>At this, Nanteuil, filled with joy, cast upon him a look of contempt.
+She feared him no longer, and she could not forgive him for having
+alarmed her.</p>
+
+<p>She rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Good evening; I have a headache. Good-bye till to-morrow, Monsieur
+Constantin Marc." And she went out briskly.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page62" id="page62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Chevalier ran after her down the corridor, descended the stage staircase
+behind her, and rejoined her by the stage doorkeeper's box.</p>
+
+<p>"F&eacute;licie, come and dine with me to-night at our cabaret. I should be so
+glad if you would! Will you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Good gracious, no!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why won't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Leave me alone; you are bothering me!"</p>
+
+<p>She tried to escape. He detained her.</p>
+
+<p>"I love you so! Don't be too cruel to me!"</p>
+
+<p>Taking a step towards him, her lips curling back from her clenched
+teeth, she hissed into his ear:</p>
+
+<p>"It's all over, over, over! You hear me? I am fed up with you."</p>
+
+<p>Then, very gently and solemnly, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is the last time that we two shall speak together. Listen, F&eacute;licie,
+before there is a tragedy I ought to warn you. I cannot compel you to
+love me. But I do not intend that you shall love another. For the last
+time I advise you not to see Monsieur de Ligny again, I shall prevent
+your belonging to him."</p>
+
+<p>"You will prevent me? You? My poor dear fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>In a still more gentle tone he replied:</p>
+
+<p>"I mean it; I shall do it. A man can get what he wants; only he must pay
+the price."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page63" id="page63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/r.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="R" alt="R" />eturning home, F&eacute;licie succumbed to a fit of tears. She saw Chevalier
+once more imploring her in a despairing voice with the look of a poor
+man. She had heard that voice and seen that expression when passing
+tramps, worn out with fatigue, on the high road, when her mother fearing
+that her lungs were affected, had taken her to spend the winter at
+Antibes with a wealthy aunt. She despised Chevalier for his gentleness
+and tranquil manner. But the recollection of that face and that voice
+disturbed her. She could not eat, she felt as if she were suffocating.
+In the evening she was attacked by such an excruciating internal pain
+that she thought she must be dying. She thought this feeling of
+prostration was due to the fact that it was two days since she had seen
+Robert. It was only nine o'clock. She hoped that she might find him
+still at home, and put on her hat.</p>
+
+<p>"Mamma, I have to go to the theatre this evening. I am off."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page64" id="page64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Out of consideration for her mother, she was in the habit of making such
+veiled explanations.</p>
+
+<p>"Go, my child, but don't come home too late."</p>
+
+<p>Ligny lived with his parents. He had, on the top floor of the charming
+house in the Rue Vernet, a small bachelor flat, lit by round windows,
+which he called his "oeil-de-boeuf." F&eacute;licie sent word by the
+hall-porter that a lady was waiting for him in a carriage. Ligny did not
+care for women to look him up too often in the bosom of his family. His
+father, who was in the diplomatic service, and deeply engrossed in the
+foreign interests of the country, remained in an incredible state of
+ignorance as to what went on in his own house. But Madame de Ligny was
+determined that the decencies of life should be observed in her home,
+and her son was careful to satisfy her requirements in the matter of
+outward appearances, since they never probed to the bottom of things.
+She left him perfectly free to love where he would, and only rarely, in
+serious and expansive moments, did she hint that it was to the advantage
+of young men to cultivate the acquaintance of women of their own class.
+Hence it was that Robert had always dissuaded F&eacute;licie from coming to him
+in the Rue Vernet. He had rented, in the Boulevard de Villiers, a small
+house, where they could meet in absolute freedom. But on the present
+occasion, after two days without
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page65" id="page65">[Pg 65]</a></span>
+
+seeing her, he was greatly pleased by
+her unexpected visit, and he came down immediately.</p>
+
+<p>Leaning back in the cab, they drove through the darkness and the snow,
+at the quiet pace of their aged hack, through the streets and
+boulevards, while the darkness of the night cloaked their love-making.</p>
+
+<p>At her door, having seen her home, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye till to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, to-morrow, Boulevard de Villiers. Come early."</p>
+
+<p>She was leaning on him preparatory to stepping down from the cab.
+Suddenly she started back.</p>
+
+<p>"There! There! Among the trees. He has seen us. He was watching us."</p>
+
+<p>"Who, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"A man&mdash;some one I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>She had just recognized Chevalier. She stepped out, rang the bell, and,
+nestling in Robert's fur coat, waited, trembling, for the door to open.
+When it was opened, she detained him.</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, see me upstairs, I am frightened."</p>
+
+<p>Not without some impatience, he followed her up the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier had waited for F&eacute;licie, in the little dining-room, before the
+armour which she had worn as Jeanne d'Arc, together with Madame
+Nanteuil,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page66" id="page66">[Pg 66]</a></span>
+
+until one o'clock in the morning. He had left at that hour,
+and had watched for her on the pavement, and on seeing the cab stop in
+front of the door he had concealed himself behind a tree. He knew very
+well that she would return with Ligny; but when he saw them together it
+was as if the earth had yawned beneath him, and, so that he should not
+fall to the ground, he had clutched the trunk of the tree. He remained
+until Ligny had emerged from the house; he watched him as, wrapped in
+his fur coat, he got into the cab, took a couple of steps as if to
+spring on him, stopped short, and then with long strides went down the
+boulevard.</p>
+
+<p>He went his way, driven by the rain and wind. Feeling too hot, he doffed
+his felt hat, and derived a certain pleasure from the sense of the icy
+drops of water on his forehead. He was vaguely conscious that houses,
+trees, walls, and lights went past him indefinitely; he wandered on,
+dreaming.</p>
+
+<p>He found himself, without knowing how he had got there, on a bridge
+which he hardly knew. Half-way across it stood the colossal statue of a
+woman. His mind was now at rest; he had formed a resolution. It was an
+old idea, which he had now driven into his brain like a nail, which
+pierced it through and through. He no longer examined it. He calculated
+coldly the means of carrying out the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page67" id="page67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+
+thing he had determined to do. He
+walked straight ahead at random, absorbed in thought, and as calm as a
+mathematician.</p>
+
+<p>On the Pont des Arts he became aware that a dog was following him. He
+was a big, long-haired farm dog, with eyes of different colours, which
+were full of gentleness, and an expression of infinite distress.
+Chevalier spoke to him:</p>
+
+<p>"You've no collar. You are not happy. Poor fellow, I can't do anything
+for you."</p>
+
+<p>By four o'clock in the morning he found himself in the Avenue de
+l'Observatoire. On seeing the houses of the Boulevard Saint-Michel he
+experienced a painful impression and abruptly turned back toward the
+Observatory. The dog had vanished. Near the monument of the Lion of
+Belfort, Chevalier stopped in front of a deep trench which cut the road
+in two. Against the bank of excavated earth, under a tarpaulin supported
+by four stakes, an old man was keeping vigil before a brazier. The
+lappets of his rabbit-skin cap were down over his ears; his huge nose
+was a flaming red. He raised his head; his eyes, which were watering,
+seemed wholly white, without pupils, each set in a ring of fire and
+tears. He was stuffing into the bowl of his cutty a few scraps of
+canteen tobacco, mixed with bread-crumbs, which did not fill half the
+bowl of his little pipe.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page68" id="page68">[Pg 68]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Will you have some tobacco, old fellow?" asked Chevalier, offering him
+his pouch.</p>
+
+<p>The man's answer was slow in coming. His understanding was not quick,
+and courtesies astonished him. Finally, he opened a mouth which was
+quite black, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I won't say no to that."</p>
+
+<p>He half rose from his seat. One of his feet was shod in an old slipper;
+the other was swathed in rags. Slowly, with hands numb with the cold, he
+stuffed his pipe. It was snowing, a snow that melted as it fell.</p>
+
+<p>"You will excuse me?" said Chevalier, and he slipped under the tarpaulin
+and seated himself beside the old man.</p>
+
+<p>From time to time they exchanged a remark.</p>
+
+<p>"Rotten weather!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's what we expect at this season. Winter's hard; summer's better."</p>
+
+<p>"So you look after the job at night, old fellow?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man answered readily when questioned. Before he spoke his throat
+emitted a long, very gentle murmur.</p>
+
+<p>"I do one thing one day; another thing another. Odd jobs. See?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are not a Parisian?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I was born in La Creuse. I used to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page69" id="page69">[Pg 69]</a></span>
+
+work as a navvy in the Vosges.
+I left there the year the Prussians and other foreigners came. There
+were thousands of them. Can't understand where they all came from. Maybe
+you've heard of the war of the Prussians, young man?"</p>
+
+<p>He remained silent for a long spell and then resumed:</p>
+
+<p>"So you are out on a spree, my lad. You don't feel like going back to
+the works yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am an actor," replied Chevalier.</p>
+
+<p>The old man who did not understand, inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"Where is it, your works?"</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier was anxious to rouse the old man's admiration.</p>
+
+<p>"I play comedy parts in a big theatre," he said. "I am one of the
+principal actors at the Od&eacute;on. You know the Od&eacute;on?"</p>
+
+<p>The watchman shook his head. No, he did not know the Od&eacute;on. After a
+prolonged silence, he once more opened the black cavern of his mouth:</p>
+
+<p>"And so, young man, you are on the loose. You don't want to go back to
+the works, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Chevalier replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Read the paper the day after to-morrow, you will see my name in it."</p>
+
+<p>The old man tried to discover a meaning in these words, but it was too
+difficult; he gave it up, and reverted to his familiar train of thought.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page70" id="page70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"When once one's off on the loose, it is sometimes for weeks and
+months."</p>
+
+<p>At daybreak, Chevalier resumed his wanderings. The sky was milky. Heavy
+wheels were breaking the silence of the paved roads. Voices, here and
+there, rang through the keen air. The snow was no longer falling. He
+walked on at haphazard. The spectacle of the city's reviving life made
+him feel almost cheerful. On the Pont des Arts he stood for a long time
+watching the Seine flow by, after which he continued on his way. On the
+Place du Havre he saw an open caf&eacute;. A faint streak of dawn was reddening
+the front windows. The waiters were sanding the brick pavement and
+setting out the tables. He flung himself into a chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Waiter, an absinthe."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page71" id="page71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/i.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="I" alt="I" />n the cab, beyond the fortifications, which were skirted by the
+deserted boulevard, F&eacute;licie and Robert held one another in a close
+embrace.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you love your own F&eacute;licie? Tell me! Doesn't it flatter your
+vanity to possess a little woman who makes people cheer and clap her,
+who is written about in the newspapers? Mamma pastes all my notices in
+her album. The album is full already."</p>
+
+<p>He replied that he had not waited for her to succeed before discovering
+how charming she was; and, in fact, their liaison had begun when she was
+making an obscure first appearance at the Od&eacute;on in a revival which had
+fallen flat.</p>
+
+<p>"When you told me that you wanted me, I didn't keep you waiting, did I?
+We didn't take long about that! Wasn't I right? You are too sensible to
+think badly of me because I didn't keep things dragging along. When I
+saw you for the first time I felt that I was to be yours, so it wasn't
+worth while delaying. I don't regret it. Do you?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page72" id="page72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The cab stopped at a short distance from the fortifications, in front
+of a garden railing.</p>
+
+<p>This railing, which had not been painted for a long time, stood on a
+wall faced with pebbles, low and broad enough to permit of children
+perching themselves on it. It was screened half-way up by a sheet of
+iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than
+ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry
+surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the
+middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside,
+with worm-eaten slatted shutters.</p>
+
+<p>They alighted from the cab. The trees of the boulevard, in four straight
+lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the
+wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to
+the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.</p>
+
+<p>"How dismal the country is!" she said, with a shiver.</p>
+
+<p>"But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country."</p>
+
+<p>He could not open the gate, and the lock creaked. Irritated by the
+sound, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Open it, do: the noise is getting on my nerves."</p>
+
+<p>She noticed that the cab which had come from
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page73" id="page73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+
+Paris had stopped near
+their house, at about the tenth tree from where she stood; she looked at
+the thin, steaming horse and the shabby driver, and asked:</p>
+
+<p>"What is that carriage?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a cab, my pet."</p>
+
+<p>"Why does it stop here?"</p>
+
+<p>"It has not stopped here? It's stopping in front of the next house."</p>
+
+<p>"There is no next house; there's only a vacant lot."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, it has stopped in front of a vacant lot. What more can I
+tell you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see anyone getting out of it."</p>
+
+<p>"The driver is perhaps waiting for a fare."</p>
+
+<p>"What, in front of a vacant lot!"</p>
+
+<p>"Probably, my dear. This lock has got rusty."</p>
+
+<p>She crept along, hiding herself behind the trees, toward the spot where
+the cab had stopped, and then returned to Ligny, who had succeeded in
+unlocking the gate.</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, the blinds of the cab are down."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, there's a loving couple inside."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think there's something queer about that cab?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is not a thing of beauty, but all cabs are ugly. Come in."</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't somebody following us?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page74" id="page74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Whom do you expect to follow us?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know. One of your women friends."</p>
+
+<p>But she was not saying what was in her thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"Do come in, my darling."</p>
+
+<p>When she had entered the garden she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Be sure to close the gate properly, Robert."</p>
+
+<p>Before them stretched a small oval grass-plot.</p>
+
+<p>Behind it stood the house, with its flight of three steps, sheltered by
+a zinc portico, its six windows, and its slate roof.</p>
+
+<p>Ligny had rented it for a year from an old merchant's clerk, who had
+wearied of it because nocturnal prowlers used to steal his fowls and
+rabbits. On either side of the grass-plot a gravel path led to the
+steps. They took the path on the right. The gravel creaked beneath their
+feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Madame Simonneau has forgotten to close the shutters again," said
+Ligny.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Simonneau was a woman from Neuilly, who came every morning to
+clean up.</p>
+
+<p>A large Judas-tree, leaning to one side, and to all appearance dead,
+stretched one of its round black branches as far as the portico.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't quite like that tree," said F&eacute;licie; "its branches are like
+great snakes. One of them goes almost into our room."</p>
+
+<p>They went up the three front steps; and, while he was looking through
+his bunch of keys for the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page75" id="page75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+
+key of the front door, she rested her head on
+his shoulder.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie, when unveiling her beauty, displayed a serene pride which made
+her adorable. She revealed such a quiet satisfaction in her nudity that
+her chemise, when it fell to her feet, made the onlooker think of a
+white peacock.</p>
+
+<p>And when Robert saw her in her nakedness, bright as the streams or
+stars, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"At least you don't make one badger you! Its curious: there are women,
+who, even if you don't ask them for anything, surrender themselves
+completely, go just as far as it's possible to go, yet all the time they
+won't let you see so much as a finger-breadth of skin."</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" asked F&eacute;licie, playing with the airy threads of her hair.</p>
+
+<p>Robert de Ligny had experience of women. Yet he did not realize what an
+insidious question this was. He had received some training in moral
+science, and in replying he derived inspiration from the professors
+whose classes he had attended.</p>
+
+<p>"It is doubtless a matter of training, religious principles, and an
+innate feeling which survives even when&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>This was not at all what he ought to have replied, for F&eacute;licie,
+shrugging her shoulders, and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page76" id="page76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+
+placing her hands upon her smoothly
+polished hips, interrupted him sharply:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you are simple! It's because they've got bad figures! Training!
+Religion! It makes me boil to hear such rubbish! Have I been brought up
+any worse than other women? Have I less religion than they have? Tell
+me, Robert, how many really well-made women have you ever seen? Just
+reckon them up on your fingers. Yes, there are heaps of women who won't
+show their shoulders or anything. Take Fagette; she won't let even women
+see her undress; when she puts a clean chemise on she holds the old one
+between her teeth. Sure enough, I should do the same if I were built as
+she is!"</p>
+
+<p>She relapsed into silence, and, with quiet arrogance, slowly ran the
+palms of her hands over her sides and her loins, observing proudly:</p>
+
+<p>"And the best of it is that there's not too much of me anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>She was conscious of the charm imparted to her beauty by the graceful
+slenderness of her outlines.</p>
+
+<p>Now her head, thrown back on the pillow, was bathed in the masses of her
+golden tresses, which lay streaming in all directions; her slender body,
+slightly raised by a pillow slipped beneath her loins, lay motionless at
+full length; one gleaming leg was extended along the edge of the bed,
+ending in a
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page77" id="page77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+
+sharply chiselled foot like the point of a sword. The light
+from the great fire which had been lit in the fireplace gilded her
+flesh, casting palpitating lights and shadows over her motionless body,
+clothing it in mystery and splendour, while her outer clothing and her
+underlinen, lying on the chairs and the carpet, waited, like a docile
+flock.</p>
+
+<p>She raised herself on her elbow, resting her cheek in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"You are the first, really you are, I am not lying: the others don't
+exist."</p>
+
+<p>He felt no jealousy in respect of the past; he had no fear of
+comparisons. He questioned her:</p>
+
+<p>"Then the others?"</p>
+
+<p>"To begin with, there were only two: my professor, and he of course
+doesn't count, and there was the man I told you about, a solid sort of a
+person, whom my mother saddled me with."</p>
+
+<p>"No more?"</p>
+
+<p>"I swear it."</p>
+
+<p>"And Chevalier?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chevalier? He? Good gracious, no! You wouldn't have had me look at
+him!"</p>
+
+<p>"And the solid sort of person found by your mother, he, too, does not
+count any more?"</p>
+
+<p>"I assure you that, with you, I am another woman. It's the solemn truth
+that you are the first to possess me. It's queer, all the same.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page78" id="page78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+
+Directly I set eyes on you I wanted you. Quite suddenly I felt I must
+have you. I felt it somehow. What? I should find it very hard to say.
+Oh, I didn't stop to think. With your conventional, stiff, frigid
+manners, and your appearance, like a curly-haired little wolf, you
+pleased me, that was all! And now I could not do without you. No,
+indeed, I couldn't."</p>
+
+<p>He assured her that on her surrender he had been deliciously surprised;
+he said all sorts of pretty, caressing things, all of which had been
+said before.</p>
+
+<p>Taking his head in her hands, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"You have really the teeth of a wolf. I think it was your teeth that
+made me want you the first day. Bite me!"</p>
+
+<p>He pressed her to his bosom, and felt her firm supple body respond to
+his embrace. Suddenly she released herself:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you hear the gravel creaking?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Listen: I can hear a sound of footsteps on the path."</p>
+
+<p>Sitting upright, her body bent forward, she strained her ears.</p>
+
+<p>He was disappointed, excited, irritated, and perhaps his self-esteem was
+slightly hurt.</p>
+
+<p>"What has come over you? It's absurd."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page79" id="page79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She cried very sharply:</p>
+
+<p>"Do hold your tongue!"</p>
+
+<p>She was listening intently to a slight sound, near at hand, as of
+breaking branches.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she leapt from the bed with such instinctive agility, with a
+movement so like the rapid spring of a young animal, that Ligny,
+although by no means of a literary turn of mind, thought of the cat
+metamorphosed into a woman.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you crazy? Where are you going?"</p>
+
+<p>Raising a corner of the curtain, she wiped the moisture from the corner
+of a pane, and peered out through the window. She saw nothing but the
+night. The noise had ceased altogether.</p>
+
+<p>During this time, Ligny, lying moodily against the wall, was grumbling:</p>
+
+<p>"As you will, but, if you catch a cold, so much the worse for you!"</p>
+
+<p>She glided back into bed. At first he remained somewhat resentful; but
+she wrapped him about with the delicious freshness of her body.</p>
+
+<p>When they came to themselves they were surprised to see by one of their
+watches that it was seven o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>Ligny lit the lamp, a paraffin lamp, supported on a column, with a
+cut-glass container inside which the wick was curled up like a
+tape-worm. F&eacute;licie was very quick in dressing herself. They
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page80" id="page80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+
+had to
+descend one floor by a wooden staircase, dark and narrow. He went ahead,
+carrying the lamp, and halted in the passage.</p>
+
+<p>"You go out, darling, before I put the lamp out."</p>
+
+<p>She opened the door, and immediately recoiled with a loud shriek. She
+had seen Chevalier standing on the outer steps, with arms extended,
+tall, black, erect as a crucifix. His hand grasped a revolver. The glint
+of the weapon was not perceptible; nevertheless she saw it quite
+distinctly.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the matter?" demanded Ligny, who was turning down the wick of
+the lamp.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, but don't come near me!" cried Chevalier in a loud voice. "I
+forbid you to belong to one another. This is my dying wish. Good-bye,
+F&eacute;licie."</p>
+
+<p>And he slipped the barrel of the revolver into his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Crouching against the passage wall, she closed her eyes. When she
+reopened them, Chevalier was lying on his side, across the doorway. His
+eyes were wide open, and he seemed to be gazing at them with a smile. A
+thread of blood was trickling from his mouth over the flagstones of the
+porch. A convulsive tremor shook his arm. Then he ceased to move. As he
+lay there, huddled up; he seemed smaller than usual.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page81" id="page81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On hearing the report of the revolver, Ligny had hurriedly come forward.
+In the darkness of the night he raised the body, and immediately
+lowering it gently to the ground he attempted to strike matches, which
+the wind promptly extinguished. At last, by the flare of one of the
+matches, he saw that the bullet had carried away part of the skull, that
+the meninges were laid bare over an area as large as the palm of the
+hand; this area was grey, oozing blood, and very irregular in shape, its
+outlines reminding Ligny of the map of Africa. He was conscious of a
+sudden feeling of respect in the presence of this dead man. Placing his
+hands under the armpits, he dragged Chevalier with the minutest
+precautions into the room at the side. Leaving him there, he hurried
+through the house in quest of F&eacute;licie, calling to her.</p>
+
+<p>He found her in the bedroom, with her head buried under the bed-clothes
+of the unmade bed, crying: "Mamma! Mamma!" and repeating prayers.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't stay here, F&eacute;licie."</p>
+
+<p>She went downstairs with him. But, on reaching the hall, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"You know very well that we can't go out that way."</p>
+
+<p>He showed her out by the kitchen door.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page82" id="page82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/l.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="44" title="L" alt="L" />eft alone in the silent house, Robert de Ligny relit the lamp. Serious
+and even somewhat solemn voices were beginning to speak within him.
+Moulded from childhood by the rules of moral responsibility, he now
+experienced a sensation of painful regret, akin to remorse. Reflecting
+that he had caused the death of this man, albeit without intending it or
+knowing it, he did not feel wholly innocent. Shreds of his philosophic
+and religious training came back to him, disturbing his conscience. The
+phrases of moralists and preachers, learned at school, which had sunk to
+the very depths of his memory, suddenly rose in his mind. Its inward
+voices repeated them to him. They said, quoting some old religious
+orator: "When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to
+those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world, we render
+ourselves liable to commit the most reprehensible actions. We perceive,
+from the most frightful examples, that voluptuousness leads to crime."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page83" id="page83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These maxims, upon which he had never reflected, suddenly assumed for
+him a precise and austere meaning. He thought the matter over seriously.
+But since his mind was not deeply religious, and since he was incapable
+of cherishing exaggerated scruples, he was conscious of only a passable
+degree of edification, which was steadily diminishing. Before long he
+decided that such scruples were out of place and that they could not
+possibly apply to the situation. "When we abandon ourselves to
+irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in
+the opinion of the world.... We perceive, from the most frightful
+examples...." These phrases, which only a little while ago had
+reverberated through his soul like a peal of thunder, he now heard in
+the snuffling and throaty voices of the professors and priests who had
+taught them to him, and he found them somewhat ridiculous. By a natural
+association of ideas he recalled a passage from an ancient Roman
+history&mdash;which he had read, when in the second form, during a certain
+course of study, and which had impressed itself on his mind&mdash;a few lines
+concerning a lady who was convicted of adultery and accused of having
+set fire to Rome. "So true it is," ran the historian's comment, "that a
+person who violates the laws of chastity is capable of any crime." He
+smiled inwardly at this recollection,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page84" id="page84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+
+reflecting that the moralists,
+after all, had queer ideas about life.</p>
+
+<p>The wick, which was charring, gave an insufficient light. He could not
+manage to snuff it, and it was giving out a horrible stench of paraffin.
+Thinking of the author of the passage relating to the Roman lady, he
+said to himself: "Sure enough, it was a queer idea that he got hold of
+there!"</p>
+
+<p>He felt reassured as to his innocence. His slight feeling of remorse had
+entirely evaporated, and he was unable to conceive how he could for a
+moment have believed himself responsible for Chevalier's death. Yet the
+affair troubled him.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he thought: "Supposing he were still alive!"</p>
+
+<p>A while ago, for the space of a second, by the light of a match blown
+out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor's skull.
+But what if he had seen incorrectly? What if he had taken a mere graze
+of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull? Does a man
+retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and
+horror? A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even
+particularly serious. It had certainly seemed to him that the man was
+dead. But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page85" id="page85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and
+muttered:</p>
+
+<p>"This lamp is enough to poison one."</p>
+
+<p>Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr. Socrates, as to the
+origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally:</p>
+
+<p>"This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils."</p>
+
+<p>Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He
+remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing
+his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but
+had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club
+a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his
+brains but merely shot off an ear. These instances applied to Chevalier
+with striking exactitude.</p>
+
+<p>"Supposing he were not dead."</p>
+
+<p>He wished and hoped against all evidence that the unfortunate man might
+still be breathing, that he might be saved. He thought of fetching
+bandages, of giving first aid. Intending to re-examine the man lying in
+the front room, he raised the lamp, which was still emitting an
+insufficient light, too suddenly, and so extinguished it. Whereupon,
+surprised by the sudden darkness, he lost patience and exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page86" id="page86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Confound the blasted thing!"</p>
+
+<p>While lighting it again, he flattered himself with the idea that
+Chevalier, once taken to hospital, would regain consciousness, and would
+live, and seeing him already on his feet, perched on his long legs,
+bawling, clearing his throat, sneering, his desire for his recovery
+became less eager; he was even beginning to cease to desire it, to
+regard it as annoying and inconsiderate. He asked himself anxiously,
+with a feeling of real uneasiness:</p>
+
+<p>"What in the world would he do if he came back, that dismal actor
+fellow? Would he return to the Od&eacute;on? Would he stroll through its
+corridors displaying his great scar? Would he once more have to see him
+prowling round F&eacute;licie?"</p>
+
+<p>He held the lighted lamp close to the body and recognized the livid
+bleeding wound, the irregular outline of which reminded him of the
+Africa of his schoolboy maps.</p>
+
+<p>Plainly death had been instantaneous, and he failed to understand how he
+could for a moment have doubted it.</p>
+
+<p>He left the house and proceeded to stride up and down in the garden. The
+image of the wound was flashing before his eyes like the impression
+caused by too bright a light. It moved away from him, increasing in size
+against the black sky; it took the shape of a pale continent whence he
+saw
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page87" id="page87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+
+swarms of distracted little blacks pouring forth, armed with bows
+and arrows.</p>
+
+<p>He decided that the first thing to do was to fetch Madame Simonneau, who
+lived close at hand, in the Boulevard Bineau, in the residential part of
+the caf&eacute;. He closed the gate carefully, and went in search of the
+housekeeper. Once on the boulevard, he recovered his equanimity. He felt
+most uncomfortable about the accident; he accepted the accomplished
+fact, but he cavilled at fate in respect of the circumstances. Since
+there had to be a death, he gave his consent that there should be one,
+but he would have preferred another. Toward this one he was conscious of
+a feeling of disgust and repugnance. He said to himself vaguely:</p>
+
+<p>"I concede a suicide. But what is the good of a ridiculous and
+declamatory suicide? Couldn't the fellow have killed himself at home?
+Couldn't he, if his determination was irrevocable, have carried it out
+discreetly, with proper pride? That is what a gentleman would have done
+in his position. Then one might have pitied him, and respected his
+memory."</p>
+
+<p>He recalled word for word his conversation with F&eacute;licie in the bedroom
+an hour before the tragedy. He asked her if she had not for a time been
+Chevalier's mistress. He had asked her this,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page88" id="page88">[Pg 88]</a></span>
+
+not because he wanted to
+know, for he had very little doubt of it, but in order to show that he
+knew it. And she had replied indignantly: "Chevalier? He? Good gracious
+no! You wouldn't have had me look at him!"</p>
+
+<p>He did not blame her for having lied. All women lie. He rather enjoyed
+the graceful and easy manner with which she had cast the fellow out of
+her past. But he was vexed with her for having given herself to a
+low-down actor. Chevalier spoilt F&eacute;licie for him. Why did she take
+lovers of that type? Was she wanting in taste? Did she not exercise a
+certain selection? Did she behave like a woman of the town? Did she lack
+a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may
+not do? Didn't she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing
+that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed F&eacute;licie for the
+accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the
+waiters in the caf&eacute;, the grocer's assistants, the girls at the laundry,
+the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a
+neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her
+face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the
+corpse. He instructed her to cover it
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page89" id="page89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+
+with a sheet, and to hold herself
+at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the
+particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please God,
+what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a
+social circle which is obsequious to the constituted authorities and
+respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she
+learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not
+conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him
+to unpleasantness.</p>
+
+<p>"You ought not to have done it," she told him. "When anyone has killed
+himself, you must never touch him before the police come."</p>
+
+<p>Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement
+having passed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because
+events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they
+take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They
+unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a
+succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the
+everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent
+death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circumstances of
+that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page90" id="page90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+
+the
+occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary's
+he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on
+his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.</p>
+
+<p>At nine o'clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden
+with his secretary and a policeman. The municipal physician, Monsieur
+Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame
+Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house
+exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles
+which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by
+an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated
+box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a
+candle.</p>
+
+<p>He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had
+just dined.</p>
+
+<p>"The bullet, a large calibre bullet," he said, "penetrated by way of the
+palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left
+parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and
+blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous."</p>
+
+<p>He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page91" id="page91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will
+probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was
+round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction."</p>
+
+<p>However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thin man with
+a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was
+howling outside the garden gate.</p>
+
+<p>"The direction of the wound," said the doctor, "as well as the fingers
+of the right hand, which are still contracted, are more than ample proof
+of suicide."</p>
+
+<p>He lit a cigar.</p>
+
+<p>"We are sufficiently informed," remarked the commissary.</p>
+
+<p>"I regret, gentlemen, to have disturbed you," said Robert de Ligny, "and
+I thank you for the courteous manner in which you have carried out your
+official duties."</p>
+
+<p>The secretary and the police agent, Madame Simonneau showing the way,
+carried the body up to the first floor.</p>
+
+<p>Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel was biting his nails and looking into space.</p>
+
+<p>"A tragedy of jealousy," he remarked, "nothing is more common. We have
+here in Neuilly a steady average of self-inflicted deaths. Out of a
+hundred suicides thirty are caused by gambling.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page92" id="page92">[Pg 92]</a></span>
+
+The others are due to
+disappointment in love, poverty, or incurable disease."</p>
+
+<p>"Chevalier?" inquired Dr. Hibry, who was a lover of the theatre,
+"Chevalier? Wait a minute! I have seen him; I saw him at a benefit
+performance, at the Vari&eacute;t&eacute;s. Of course! He recited a monologue."</p>
+
+<p>The dog howled outside the garden gate.</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot imagine," resumed the commissary, "the disasters caused in
+this municipality by the <i>pari mutuel</i>. I am not exaggerating when I
+assert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to
+look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every
+hairdresser's shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last
+week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in
+the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who
+gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another
+quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom
+gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors,
+threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a
+court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have it!" exclaimed the physician. "He recited <i>The Duel in the
+Prairie</i>. People are rather tired of monologues, but that is very funny.
+You
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page93" id="page93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+
+remember! 'Will you fight with the sword?' 'No, sir.' 'The pistol?'
+'No, sir.' 'The sabre, the knife?' 'No, sir.' 'Ah, then, I see what you
+want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I
+agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are
+permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation.' Chevalier used to
+recite <i>The Duel in the Prairie</i> in a very humorous manner. He amused me
+greatly that night. It is true that I am not an ungrateful audience; I
+worship the theatre."</p>
+
+<p>The commissary was not listening. He was following up his own train of
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>"It will never be known, how many fortunes and lives are devoured each
+year by the <i>pari mutuel</i>. Gambling never releases its victims; when it
+has despoiled them of everything, it still remains their only hope. What
+else, indeed, will permit them to hope?"</p>
+
+<p>He ceased, straining his ear to catch the distant cry of a newsvendor,
+and rushed out into the avenue in pursuit of the fugitive yelping
+shadow, hailed him, and snatched from him a sporting paper, which he
+spread out under the light of a gas-lamp, scanning its pages for certain
+names of horses: <i>Fleur-des-pois</i>, <i>La Ch&acirc;telaine</i>, <i>Lucr&egrave;ce</i>. With haggard
+eyes, trembling hands, dumbfounded, crushed, he dropped the sheet: his
+horse had not won.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page94" id="page94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And Dr. Hibry, observing him from a distance, reflected that some day,
+in his capacity of physician to the dead, he might well be called upon
+to certify the suicide of his commissary of police, and he made up his
+mind in advance to conclude, as far as possible, that his death was due
+to accidental causes.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he seized his umbrella.</p>
+
+<p>"I must be off," he said. "I have been given a seat for the
+Op&eacute;ra-Comique to-night. It would be a pity to waste it."</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving the house, Ligny asked Madame Simonneau:</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you put him?"</p>
+
+<p>"In the bed," replied Madame Simonneau. "It was more decent."</p>
+
+<p>He made no objection, and raising his eyes to the front of the house, he
+saw at the windows of the bedroom, through the muslin curtains, the
+light of the two candles which the housekeeper had placed on the bedside
+table.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," he said, "one might get a nun to watch by him."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not necessary," replied Madame Simonneau, who had invited some
+neighbours of her own sex, and had ordered her wine and meat. "It's not
+necessary, I will watch by him myself."</p>
+
+<p>Ligny did not press the point.</p>
+
+<p>The dog was still howling outside the gate.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page95" id="page95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Returning on foot to the barrier, he noticed, over Paris, a reddish glow
+which filled the whole sky. Above the chimney-pots the factory chimneys
+rose grotesque and black, against this fiery mist, seeming to look down
+with a ridiculous familiarity upon the mysterious conflagration of a
+world. The few passers-by whom he met on the boulevard strolled along
+quietly, without raising their heads. Although he knew that when cities
+are wrapped in night the moist atmosphere often reflects the lights,
+becoming tinged with this uniform glow, which shines without a flicker,
+he fancied that he was looking at the reflection of a vast fire. He
+accepted, without reflection, the idea that Paris was sinking into the
+abyss of a prodigious conflagration; he found it natural that the
+private catastrophe in which he had become involved should be merged
+into a public disaster and that this same night should be for a whole
+population, as for him! a night of sinister happenings.</p>
+
+<p>Being extremely hungry, he took a cab at the barrier, and had himself
+driven to a restaurant in the Rue Royale. In the bright, warm room he
+was conscious of a sense of well-being. After ordering his meal, he
+opened an evening newspaper and saw, in the Parliamentary report, that
+his Minister had delivered a speech. On reading it, he smothered a
+slight laugh; he remembered
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page96" id="page96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+
+certain stories told at the Quai d'Orsay.
+The Minister of Foreign Affairs was enamoured of Madame de Neuilles, an
+elderly lady with a lurid past, whom public rumour had raised to the
+status of adventuress and spy. He was wont, it was whispered, to try on
+her the speeches which he was to deliver in the Chamber. Ligny, who had
+formerly been to a certain small extent the lover of Madame de Neuilles,
+pictured to himself the statesman in his shirt reciting to his lady-love
+the following statement of principles: "Far be it from me to disregard
+the legitimate susceptibilities of the national sentiment. Resolutely
+pacific, but jealous of France's honour, the Government will, etc." This
+vision put him in a merry mood. He turned the page, and read: To-morrow
+at the Od&eacute;on, first performance (in this theatre) of <i>La Nuit du 23
+octobre 1812</i> with Messieurs Durville, Maury, Romilly, Destr&eacute;e, Vicar,
+L&eacute;on Clim, Valroche, Aman, Chevalier....</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page97" id="page97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/a.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="A" alt="A" />t one o'clock on the following day <i>La Grille</i> was in rehearsal, for
+the first time, in the green-room of the theatre. A dismal light spread
+like a pall over the grey stones of the roof, the galleries, and the
+columns. In the depressing majesty of this pallid architecture, beneath
+the statue of Racine, the leading actors were reading before Pradel, the
+manager of the house, their parts, which they did not yet know. Romilly,
+the stage manager, and Constantine Marc, the author of the piece, were
+all three seated on a red velvet sofa, while, from a bench set back
+between two columns, was exhaled the vigilant hatred and whispered
+jealousy of the actresses left out of the cast.</p>
+
+<p>The lover, Paul Delage, was with difficulty deciphering a speech:</p>
+
+<p>"'I recognize the ch&acirc;teau with its brick walls, its slated roof; the
+park, where I have so often entwined her initials and mine on the bark
+of the trees; the pond whose slumbering waters....'"</p>
+
+<p>Fagette rebuked him:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page98" id="page98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'Beware, Aimeri, lest the ch&acirc;teau know you not again, lest the park
+forget your name, lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"</p>
+
+<p>But she had a cold, and was reading from a manuscript copy full of
+mistakes.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't stand there, Fagette: it's the summer-house," said Romilly.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you expect me to know that?"</p>
+
+<p>"There's a chair put there."</p>
+
+<p>"'Lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"</p>
+
+<p>"Mademoiselle Nanteuil, it's your cue&mdash;&mdash;Where has Nanteuil got to?
+Nanteuil!"</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil came forward muffled up in her furs, her little bag and her
+part in her hand, white as a sheet, her eyes sunken, her legs nerveless.
+When fully awake she had seen the dead man enter her bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>She inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"Where do I make my entrance from?"</p>
+
+<p>"From the right."</p>
+
+<p>"All right."</p>
+
+<p>And she read:</p>
+
+<p>"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning, I do not know why it
+was. Can you perhaps tell me?'"</p>
+
+<p>Delage read his reply:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page99" id="page99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'It may be, C&eacute;cile, that it was due to a special dispensation of
+Providence or of fate. The God who loves you suffers you to smile, in
+the hour of weeping and the gnashing of teeth.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Nanteuil, my darling, you cross the stage," said Romilly. "Delage,
+stand aside a bit to let her pass."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil crossed over.</p>
+
+<p>"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them.
+They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"</p>
+
+<p>Romilly interrupted:</p>
+
+<p>"Delage, efface yourself a trifle; be careful not to hide her from the
+audience. Once more, Nanteuil."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil repeated:</p>
+
+<p>"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them.
+They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc no longer recognized his handiwork, he could no longer
+even hear the sound of his beloved phrases, which he had so often
+repeated to himself in the Vivarais woods. Dumbfounded and dazed, he
+held his peace.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil tripped daintily across the stage, and resumed reading her
+part:</p>
+
+<p>"'You will perhaps think me very foolish, Aimeri; in the convent where I
+was brought up, I often used to envy the fate of the victims.'"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page100" id="page100">[Pg 100]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Delage took up his cue, but he had overlooked a page of the manuscript:</p>
+
+<p>"'The weather is magnificent. Already the guests are strolling about the
+garden.'"</p>
+
+<p>It became necessary to start all over again.</p>
+
+<p>"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri....'"</p>
+
+<p>And so they proceeded, without troubling to understand, but careful to
+regulate their movements, as if studying the figures of a dance.</p>
+
+<p>"In the interests of the play, we shall have to make some cuts," said
+Pradel to the dismayed author.</p>
+
+<p>And Delage continued:</p>
+
+<p>"'Do not blame me, C&eacute;cile: I felt for you a friendship dating from
+childhood, one of those fraternal friendships which impart to the love
+which springs from them a disquieting appearance of incest.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Incest," shouted Pradel. "You cannot let the word 'incest' remain,
+Monsieur Constantin Marc. The public has susceptibilities of which you
+have no idea. Moreover, the order of the two speeches which follow must
+be transposed. The optics of the stage require it."</p>
+
+<p>The rehearsal was interrupted. Romilly caught sight of Durville who, in
+a recess, was telling racy stories.</p>
+
+<p>"Durville, you can go. The second act will not be rehearsed to-day."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page101" id="page101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Before leaving, the old actor went up to Nanteuil, to press her hand.
+Judging that this was the moment to assure her of his sympathy, he
+summoned up the tears to his eyes, as anyone condoling with her would
+have done in his place. But he did it admirably. The pupils of his eyes
+swam in their orbits, like the moon amid clouds. The corners of his lips
+were turned down in two deep furrows which prolonged them to the bottom
+of his chin. He appeared to be genuinely afflicted.</p>
+
+<p>"My poor darling," he sighed, "I pity you, I do indeed! To see one for
+whom one has experienced a&mdash;feeling&mdash;with whom one has&mdash;lived in
+intimacy&mdash;to see him carried off at a blow&mdash;a tragic blow&mdash;is hard, is
+terrible!"</p>
+
+<p>And he extended his compassionate hands. Nanteuil, completely unnerved,
+and crushing her tiny handkerchief and her part in her hands, turned her
+back upon him, and hissed between her teeth:</p>
+
+<p>"Old idiot!"</p>
+
+<p>Fagette passed her arm round her waist, and led her gently aside to the
+foot of Racine's statue, where she whispered into her ear:</p>
+
+<p>"Listen to me, my dear. This affair must be completely hushed up.
+Everybody is talking about it. If you let people talk, they will brand
+you for life as Chevalier's widow."</p>
+
+<p>Then, being something of a talker, she added:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page102" id="page102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I know you, I am your best friend. I know your value. But beware,
+F&eacute;licie: women are held at their own valuation."</p>
+
+<p>Every one of Fagette's shafts told. Nanteuil, with fiery cheeks, held
+back her tears. Too young to possess or even to desire the prudence
+which comes to celebrated actresses when of an age to graduate as women
+of the world of fashion, she was full of self-esteem, and since she had
+known what it was to love another she was eager to efface everything
+unfashionable from her past; she felt that Chevalier, in killing himself
+for her sake, had behaved towards her publicly with a familiarity which
+made her ridiculous. Still unaware that all things fall into oblivion,
+and are lost in the swift current of our days, that all our actions flow
+like the waters of a river, between banks that have no memory, she
+pondered, irritated and dejected, at the feet of Jean Racine, who
+understood her grief.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at her," said Madame Marie-Claire to young Delage. "She wants
+to cry. I understand her. A man killed himself for me. I was greatly
+upset by it. He was a count."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, begin again!" shouted Pradel. "Come now, Mademoiselle Nanteuil,
+your cue!"</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon Nanteuil:</p>
+
+<p>"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page103" id="page103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, Madame Doulce appeared. Ponderous and mournful, she let fall
+the following words:</p>
+
+<p>"I have very sad news. The parish priest will not allow him to enter his
+church."</p>
+
+<p>As Chevalier had no relations left other than a sister, a working-woman
+at Pantin, Madame Doulce had undertaken to make arrangements for the
+funeral at the expense of the members of the company.</p>
+
+<p>They gathered round her. She continued:</p>
+
+<p>"The Church rejects him as though he were accurst! That's dreadful!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" asked Romilly.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce replied in a very low tone and as if reluctantly:</p>
+
+<p>"Because he committed suicide."</p>
+
+<p>"We must see to this," said Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>Romilly displayed an eager desire to be of service.</p>
+
+<p>"The cur&eacute; knows me," he said. "He is a very decent fellow. I'll just run
+over to Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont, and I'd be greatly surprised if&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce shook her head sadly:</p>
+
+<p>"All is useless."</p>
+
+<p>"All the same, we must have a religious service," said Romilly, with all
+the authority of a stage-manager.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page104" id="page104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Quite so," said Madame Doulce.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Marie-Claire, deeply exercised in her mind, was of opinion that
+the priests could be compelled to say a Mass.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us keep cool," said Pradel, caressing his venerable beard. "Under
+Louis VIII the people broke in the doors of Saint-Roch, which had been
+closed to the coffin of Mademoiselle Raucourt. We live in other times,
+and under different circumstances. We must have recourse to gentler
+methods."</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc, seeing to his great regret that his play was abandoned,
+had likewise approached Madame Doulce; he inquired of her:</p>
+
+<p>"Why should you want Chevalier to be blessed by the Church? Personally,
+I am a Catholic. With me, it is not a faith, it is a system, and I look
+upon it as a duty to participate in all the external practices of
+worship. I am on the side of all authorities. I am for the judge, the
+soldier, the priest. I cannot therefore be suspected of favouring civil
+burials. But I hardly understand why you persist in offering the cur&eacute; of
+Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont a dead body which he repudiates. Now why do you
+want this unfortunate Chevalier to go to church?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" replied Madame Doulce. "For the salvation of his soul and because
+it is more seemly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page105" id="page105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What would be seemly," replied Constantin Marc, "would be to obey the
+laws of the Church, which excommunicates suicides."</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Constantin Marc, have you read <i>Les Soir&eacute;es de Neuilly</i>?"
+inquired Pradel, who was an ardent collector of old books and a great
+reader. "What, you have not read <i>Les Soir&eacute;es de Neuilly</i>, by Monsieur
+de Fongeray? You have missed something. It is a curious book, which can
+still be met with sometimes on the quays. It is adorned by a lithograph
+of Henry Monnier's, which is, I don't know why, a caricature of
+Stendhal. Fongeray is the pseudonym of two Liberals of the Restoration,
+Dittmer and Cav&eacute;. The work consists of comedies and dramas which cannot
+be acted; but which contain some most interesting scenes representing
+manners and customs. You will read in it how, in the reign of Charles X,
+a vicar of one of the Paris churches, the Abb&eacute; Mouchaud, would refuse
+burial to a pious lady, and would, at all costs, grant it to an atheist.
+Madame d'Hautefeuille was religious, but she held some national
+property. At her death, she received the ministrations of a Jansenist
+priest. For this reason, after her death, the Abb&eacute; Mouchaud refused to
+receive her into the church in which she had passed her life. At the
+same time, in the same parish, Monsieur Dubourg, a big banker, was good
+enough to die. In his will he stipulated that he
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page106" id="page106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+
+should be borne
+straight to the cemetery. 'He is a Catholic,' reflected the Abb&eacute;
+Mouchaud, 'he belongs to us.' Quickly making a parcel of his stole and
+surplice, he rushed off to the dead man's house, administered extreme
+unction, and brought him into his church."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," replied Constantin Marc, "that vicar was an excellent
+politician. Atheists are not formidable enemies of the Church. They do
+not count as adversaries. They cannot raise a Church against her, and
+they do not dream of doing so. Atheists have existed at all times among
+the heads and princes of the Church, and many of them have rendered
+signal services to the Papacy. On the other hand, whoever does not
+submit strictly to ecclesiastical discipline and breaks away from
+tradition upon a single point, whoever sets up a faith against the
+faith, an opinion, a practices against the accepted opinion and the
+common practice, is a factor of disorder, a menace of peril, and must be
+extirpated. This the vicar, Mouchaud, understood. He should have been
+made a Cardinal."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce, who had been clever enough not to tell everything in a
+breath, went on to say:</p>
+
+<p>"I did not allow myself to be discomfited by the opposition of Monsieur
+le Cur&eacute;. I begged, I entreated. And his answer was: 'We owe respectful
+obedience to the Ordinary. Go to the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page107" id="page107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+
+Archbishop's Palace. I will do as
+Monseigneur bids me.' There is nothing left for me but to follow this
+advice. I'm hurrying off to the Archbishop's Palace."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us get to work," said Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>Romilly called to Nanteuil:</p>
+
+<p>"Nanteuil! Come, Nanteuil, begin your whole scene over again."</p>
+
+<p>And Nanteuil said once more:</p>
+
+<p>"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page108" id="page108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/t2.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="T" alt="T" />he prominence given by the Press to the suicide of the Boulevard de
+Villiers rendered the negotiations between the Stage and the Church all
+the more difficult. The reporters had given the fullest details of the
+event, and it was pointed out by the Abb&eacute; Mirabelle, the Archbishop's
+second vicar, that to open the doors of the parish church to Chevalier,
+as matters then stood, was to proclaim that excommunicated persons were
+entitled to the prayers of the Church.</p>
+
+<p>But for that matter, Monsieur Mirabelle himself, who in this affair
+displayed great wisdom and circumspection, paved the way to a solution.</p>
+
+<p>"You must fully understand," he observed to Madame Doulce, "that the
+opinion of the newspapers cannot affect our decision. We are absolutely
+indifferent to it, and we do not disturb ourselves in the slightest
+degree, no matter what fifty public sheets may say about the unfortunate
+young fellow. Whether the journalists have told the truth or distorted
+it is their affair, not mine. I do not know
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page109" id="page109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+
+and I do not wish to know
+what they have written. But the fact of the suicide is notorious. You
+cannot dispute it. It would now be advisable to investigate closely, and
+by the light of science, the circumstances in which the deed was
+committed. Do not be surprised by my thus invoking the aid of science.
+Science has no better friend than religion. Now medical science may in
+the present case be of great assistance to us. You will understand in a
+moment. Mother Church ejects the suicide from her bosom only when his
+act is an act of despair. The madmen who attempt their own lives are not
+those who have lost all hope, and the Church does not deny them her
+prayers; she prays for all who are unfortunate. Now, if it could be
+proved that this poor boy had acted under the influence of a high fever
+or of a mental disorder, if a medical man were in a position to certify
+that the poor fellow was not in possession of his faculties when he slew
+himself with his own hand, there would be no obstacle to the celebration
+of a religious service."</p>
+
+<p>Having hearkened to the words of Monsieur l'Abb&eacute; Mirabelle, Madame
+Doulce hastened back to the theatre. The rehearsal of <i>La Grille</i> was
+over. She found Pradel in his office with a couple of young actresses,
+one of whom was soliciting an engagement, the other, leave of absence.
+He refused, in conformity with his principle never to grant a
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page110" id="page110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+
+request
+until he had first refused it. In this way he bestowed a value upon his
+most trifling concessions. His glistening eyes and his patriarchal
+beard, his manner, at once amorous and paternal, gave him a resemblance
+to Lot, as we see him between his two daughters in the prints of the Old
+Masters. Standing on the table was an amphora of gilt pasteboard which
+fostered this illusion.</p>
+
+<p>"It can't be done," he was telling each of them. "It really can't be
+done, my child&mdash;&mdash;Well, after all, look in to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>Having dismissed them, he inquired, as he signed some letters:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Madame Doulce, what news do you bring?"</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc, appearing with Nanteuil, hastily exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"What about my scenery, Monsieur Pradel?"</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon he described for the twentieth time the landscape, upon which
+the curtain ought to rise.</p>
+
+<p>"In the foreground, an old park. The trunks of the great trees, on the
+north side, are green with moss. The dampness of the soil must be felt."</p>
+
+<p>And the manager replied:</p>
+
+<p>"You may rest assured that everything that can be done will be done, and
+that it will be most appropriate. Well, Madame Doulce, what news?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page111" id="page111">[Pg 111]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There is a glimmer of hope," she replied.</p>
+
+<p>"At the back, in a slight mist," said the author, "the grey stones and
+the slate roofs of the Abbaye-aux-Dames."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so. Pray be seated, Madame Doulce; you have my attention."</p>
+
+<p>"I was most courteously received at the Archbishop's Palace," said
+Madame Doulce.</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Pradel, it is imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should
+appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists
+of coming night. A pale-gold sky&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur l'Abb&eacute; Mirabelle," resumed Madame Doulce, "is a priest of the
+highest distinction&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur Marc, are you particularly keen on your pale-gold sky?"
+inquired the stage manager. "Go on, Madame Doulce, go on, I am listening
+to you."</p>
+
+<p>"And exquisitely polite. He made a delicate allusion to the
+indiscretions of the newspapers&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>At this moment Monsieur Marchegeay, the stage manager, burst into the
+room. His green eyes were glittering, and his red moustache was dancing
+like a flame. The words rolled off his tongue:</p>
+
+<p>"They are at it again! Lydie, the little super, is screaming like a
+stoat on the stairs. She says Delage tried to violate her.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page112" id="page112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+
+It's at least
+the tenth time in a month that she has come out with that story. This
+is an infernal nuisance!"</p>
+
+<p>"Such conduct cannot be tolerated in a house like this," said Pradel.
+"You'll have to fine Delage. Pray continue, Madame Doulce."</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur l'Abb&eacute; Mirabelle explained to me in the clearest manner that
+suicide is an act of despair."</p>
+
+<p>But Constantin Marc was inquiring of Pradel with interest, whether
+Lydie, the little super, was pretty.</p>
+
+<p>"You have seen her in <i>La Nuit du 23 octobre</i>; she plays the woman of
+the people who, in the Plaine de Grenelle, is buying wafers of Madame
+Ravaud."</p>
+
+<p>"A very pretty girl, to my thinking," said Constantin Marc.</p>
+
+<p>"Undoubtedly," responded Pradel. "But she would be still prettier if her
+ankles weren't like stakes."</p>
+
+<p>And Constantin Marc musingly replied.</p>
+
+<p>"And Delage has outraged her. That fellow possesses the sense of love.
+Love is a simple and primitive act. It's a struggle, it's hatred.
+Violence is necessary to it. Love by mutual consent is merely a tedious
+obligation."</p>
+
+<p>And he cried, greatly excited.</p>
+
+<p>"Delage is prodigious!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't get yourself into a fix," said Pradel.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page113" id="page113">[Pg 113]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"This same little Lydie entices my actors into her dressing-room, and
+then all of a sudden she screams out that she is being outraged in order
+to get hush-money out of them. It's her lover who has taught her the
+trick, and takes the coin. You were saying, Madame Doulce&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"After a long and interesting conversation," resumed Madame Doulce,
+"Monsieur l'Abb&eacute; Mirabelle suggested a favourable solution. He gave me
+to understand that, in order to remove all difficulties, it would be
+sufficient for a physician to certify that Chevalier was not in full
+possession of his faculties, and that he was not responsible for his
+acts."</p>
+
+<p>"But," observed Pradel, "Chevalier wasn't insane. He was in full
+possession of his faculties."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not for us to say," replied Madame Doulce. "What do we know about
+it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Nanteuil, "he was not in full possession of his faculties."</p>
+
+<p>Pradel shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"After all, it's possible. Insanity and reason, it's a matter of
+appreciation. To whom could we apply for a certificate?"</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce and Pradel called to mind three physicians in succession;
+but they were unable to find the address of the first; the second was
+bad-tempered, and it was decided that the third was dead.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page114" id="page114">[Pg 114]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil suggested that they should approach Dr. Trublet.</p>
+
+<p>"That's an idea!" exclaimed Pradel. "Let us ask a certificate of Dr.
+Socrates. What's to-day? Friday. It's his day for consultations. We
+shall find him at home."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Trublet lived in an old house at the top of the Rue de Seine. Pradel
+took Nanteuil with him, with the idea that Socrates would refuse nothing
+to a pretty woman. Constantin Marc, who could not live, when in Paris,
+save in the company of theatrical folk, accompanied them. The Chevalier
+affair was beginning to amuse him. He found it theatrical, that is,
+appropriate to theatrical performers. Although the hour for
+consultations was over, the doctor's sitting-room was still full of
+people in search of healing. Trublet dismissed them, and received his
+theatrical friends in his private room. He was standing in front of a
+table encumbered with books and papers. An adjustable arm-chair, infirm
+and cynical, displayed itself by the window. The director of the Od&eacute;on
+set forth the object of his call, and ended by saying:</p>
+
+<p>"Chevalier's funeral service cannot be celebrated in the church unless
+you certify that the unfortunate young man was not altogether sane."</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Trublet declared that Chevalier might very well do without a
+religious service.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page115" id="page115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Adrienne Lecouvreur, who was of more account than Chevalier, did
+without one. Mademoiselle Monime had no Mass said for her after her
+death, and, as you are aware, she was denied 'the honour of rotting in a
+nasty cemetery in the company of all the beggars of the quarter.' She
+was none the worse off for that."</p>
+
+<p>"You are not ignorant of the fact, Dr. Socrates," replied Pradel, "that
+actors and actresses are the most religious of people. My company would
+be deeply grieved if they could not be present at the celebration of a
+Mass for their colleague. They have already secured the co-operation of
+several lyric artists, and the music will be very fine."</p>
+
+<p>"Now that's a reason," said Trublet "I do not gainsay it. Charles
+Monselet, who was a witty fellow, was reflecting, only a few hours
+before his death, on his musical Mass, 'I know a great many singers at
+the Op&eacute;ra,' he said, 'I shall have a <i>Pie J&eacute;su aux truffes</i>.' But, as on
+this occasion the Archbishop does not authorize a spiritual concert, it
+would be more convenient to postpone it to some other occasion."</p>
+
+<p>"As far as I am concerned," replied the director, "I have no religious
+belief. But I consider that the Church and the Stage are two great
+social powers, and that it is beneficial that they should be friends and
+allies. For my own part, I never lose
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page116" id="page116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+
+an opportunity of sealing the
+alliance. This coming Lent, I shall have Durville read one of
+Bourdaloue's sermons. I receive a State subsidy. I must observe the
+Concordat. Moreover, whatever people may say, Catholicism is the most
+acceptable form of religious indifference."</p>
+
+<p>"Well then," objected Constantin Marc, "since you wish to show deference
+to the Church, why do you foist upon her, by force or by subterfuge, a
+coffin which she doesn't want?"</p>
+
+<p>The doctor spoke in a similar strain, and ended by saying.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Pradel, don't you have anything more to do with the matter."</p>
+
+<p>"Whereupon Nanteuil, her eyes blazing, her voice sibilant, cried:</p>
+
+<p>"He must go to church, doctor; sign what is asked of you, write that he
+was not in possession of his faculties, I entreat you."</p>
+
+<p>There was not religion alone at the back of this desire. Blended with it
+was an intimate feeling, an obscure background of old beliefs, of which
+she herself was unaware. She hoped that if he were carried into the
+church, and sprinkled with holy water, Chevalier would be appeased,
+would become one of the peaceful dead, and would no longer torment her.
+She feared, on the other hand, that if he were deprived of benediction
+and prayers he
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page117" id="page117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+
+would perpetually hover about her, accursed and
+maleficent. And, more simply still, in her dread of seeing him again,
+she was anxious that the priests should take good care to bury him, and
+that everybody should attend the funeral, so that he should be all the
+more thoroughly buried; as thoroughly buried, in short, as it was
+possible to be. Her lips trembled and she wrung her hands.</p>
+
+<p>Trublet, who had long graduated in human nature, watched her with
+interest. He understood and took a special interest in the female of the
+human machine. This particular specimen filled him with joy. His
+snub-nosed face beamed with delight as he watched her.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be uneasy, child. There is always a way of coming to an
+understanding with the Church. What you are asking me is not within my
+powers; I am a lay doctor. But we have to-day, thank God, religious
+physicians who send their patients to the ecclesiastical waters, and
+whose special function is to attest miraculous cures. I know one who
+lives in this part of the town; I'll give you his address. Go and see
+him; the Bishop will refuse him nothing. He will arrange the matter for
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all," said Pradel. "You always attended poor Chevalier. It is
+for you to give a certificate."</p>
+
+<p>Romilly agreed:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page118" id="page118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Of course, doctor. You are the physician to the theatre. We must wash
+our dirty linen at home."</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, Nanteuil turned upon Socrates a gaze of entreaty.</p>
+
+<p>"But," objected Trublet, "what do you want me to say?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's very simple," Pradel replied. "Say that he was to a certain extent
+irresponsible."</p>
+
+<p>"You are simply asking me to speak like a police surgeon. It's expecting
+too much of me."</p>
+
+<p>"You believe then, doctor, that Chevalier was fully and entirely morally
+responsible?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite the contrary. I am of opinion that he was not in the least
+responsible for his actions."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"But I also consider that, in this respect, he differed in nowise from
+you, myself, and all other men. My judicial colleagues distinguish
+between individual responsibilities. They have procedures by which they
+recognize full responsibilities, and those which lack one or more
+fractional parts. It is a remarkable fact, moreover, that in order to
+get a poor wretch condemned they always find him fully responsible. May
+we not therefore consider that their own responsibility is full&mdash;like
+the moon?"</p>
+
+<p>And Dr. Socrates proceeded to unfold before
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page119" id="page119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+
+the astonished stage folk a
+comprehensive theory of universal determinism. He went back to the
+origins of life, and, like the Silenus of Virgil, who, smeared with the
+juice of mulberries, sang to the shepherds of Sicily and the naiad
+Aglaia of the origin of the world, he broke out into a flood of words:</p>
+
+<p>"To call upon a poor wretch to answer for his actions! Why, even when
+the solar system was still no more than a pale nebula, forming, in the
+ether, a fragile halo, whose circumference was a thousand times greater
+than the orbit of Neptune, we had all of us, for ages past, been fully
+conditioned, determined and irrevocably destined, and your
+responsibility, my dear child, my responsibility, Chevalier's, and that
+of all men, had been, not mitigated, but abolished beforehand. All our
+movements, the result of previous movements of matter, are subject to
+the laws which govern the cosmic forces, and the human mechanism is
+merely a particular instance of the universal mechanism."</p>
+
+<p>Pointing to a locked cupboard, he proceeded.</p>
+
+<p>"I have there, contained in bottles, that which would transform,
+destroy, or excite to frenzy the will of fifty thousand men."</p>
+
+<p>"Wouldn't be playing the game," objected Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>"I agree, it wouldn't be playing the game.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page120" id="page120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+
+But these substances are not
+essentially laboratory products. The laboratory combines, it does not
+create anything. These substances are scattered throughout nature. In
+their free state, they surround and enter into us, they determine our
+will, they circumscribe our freedom of device, which is merely the
+illusion engendered within us by the ignorance of our determinations."</p>
+
+<p>"What on earth do you mean?" asked Pradel, taken aback.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that our will is an illusion caused by our ignorance of the
+causes which compel us to exert our will. That which wills within us is
+not ourselves, but myriads of cells of prodigious activity, of which we
+know nothing, which are unaware of us, which are ignorant of one
+another, but which nevertheless constitute us. By means of their
+restlessness they produce innumerable currents which we call our
+passions, our thoughts, our joys, our sufferings, our desires, our
+fears, and our will. We believe that we are our own masters, while a
+mere drop of alcohol stimulates, and then benumbs the very elements by
+which we feel and will."</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc interrupted the physician:</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me! Since you are speaking of the action of alcohol, I should
+like your advice on the subject. I am in the habit of drinking a small
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page121" id="page121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+
+glass of Armagnac brandy after each meal. That's not too much, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a great deal too much. Alcohol is a poison. If you have a bottle
+of brandy at home, fling it out of the window."</p>
+
+<p>Pradel was pondering. He considered that in suppressing will and
+responsibility in all human things Dr. Socrates was doing him a personal
+injury.</p>
+
+<p>"You may say what you like. Will and responsibility are not illusions.
+They are tangible and powerful realities. I know how the terms of my
+contract bind me, and I impose my will on others."</p>
+
+<p>And he added with some bitterness:</p>
+
+<p>"I believe in the will, in moral responsibility, in the distinction
+between good and evil. Doubtless these are, according to you, stupid
+ideas."</p>
+
+<p>"They are indeed stupid ideas," replied the physician, "but they are
+very suitable to us, since we are mere animals. We are for ever
+forgetting this. They are stupid, venerable, wholesome ideas. Men have
+felt that, without these ideas, they would all go mad. They had only the
+choice between stupidity and madness. Very reasonably they chose
+stupidity. Such is the foundation of moral ideas."</p>
+
+<p>"What a paradox!" exclaimed Romilly.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page122" id="page122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The physician calmly proceeded:</p>
+
+<p>"The distinction between good and evil in human societies has never
+emerged from the grossest empiricism. It was constituted in a wholly
+practical spirit and as a simple convenience. We do not trouble
+ourselves about it where cut-glass or a tree is concerned. We practise
+moral indifference with regard to animals. We practise it in the case of
+savage races. This enables us to exterminate them without remorse.
+That's what is known as the colonial policy. Nor do we find that
+believers exact a high degree of morality from their god. In the present
+state of society, they would not willingly admit that he was lecherous
+or compromised himself with women; but they do think it fitting that he
+should be vindictive and cruel. Morality is a mutual agreement to keep
+what we possess: land, houses, furniture, women, and our lives. It does
+not imply, in the case of those who bow to it, any particular
+intelligence or character. It is instinctive and ferocious. Written law
+follows it closely, and is in more or less harmonious agreement with it.
+Hence we see that great-hearted men, or men of brilliant genius, have
+almost all been accused of impiety, and, like Socrates, the son of
+Phenaretes, and Beno&icirc;t Malon, have been smitten by the tribunals of
+their country. And it may be stated that a man who has not, at
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page123" id="page123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+
+the very
+least, been sentenced to imprisonment does little credit to the land of
+his fathers."</p>
+
+<p>"There are exceptions," remarked Pradel.</p>
+
+<p>"Few," replied Dr. Trublet.</p>
+
+<p>But Nanteuil, pursuing her idea, remarked.</p>
+
+<p>"My little Socrates, you can very well certify that he was insane. It is
+the truth. He was not sane, I know it only too well."</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt he was mad, my dear child. But it is a question of determining
+whether he was madder than other men. The entire history of humanity,
+replete with tortures, ecstasies, and massacres, is the history of
+raving, demented creatures."</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor," inquired Constantin Marc, "are you by chance one of those who
+do not admire War? It is nevertheless a magnificent thing, when you come
+to think of it. The animals merely eat one another. Men have conceived
+the idea of beautiful massacres. They have learnt to kill one another in
+glittering cuirasses, in helmets topped with plumes, or maned with
+scarlet. By the use of artillery, and the art of fortification, they
+have introduced chemistry and mathematics among the necessary means of
+destruction. War is a sublime invention. And, since the extermination of
+human beings appears to us the only object of life, the wisdom of man
+resides in this, that he has made
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page124" id="page124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+
+this extermination a delight and a
+splendour. After all, doctor, you cannot deny that murder is a law of
+nature, and that it is consequently divine."</p>
+
+<p>To which Dr. Socrates replied:</p>
+
+<p>"We are only miserable animals, and yet we are our own providence and
+our own gods. The lower animals, whose immemorial reign preceded our own
+upon this planet, have transformed it by their genius and their courage.
+The insects have traced roads, excavated the soil, hollowed the trunks
+of trees and rocks, built dwellings, founded cities, metamorphosed the
+soil, the air, and the waters. The labour of the humblest of these, that
+of the madrepores, has created islands and continents. Every material
+change produces a moral change, since morals depend upon environment.
+The transformation to which man in his turn has subjected the earth is
+undoubtedly more profound and more harmonious than the transformation
+wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing
+nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity,
+miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in
+suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why
+indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a
+great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is
+possible that our
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page125" id="page125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
+
+race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania,
+dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness.
+This world is perhaps irremediably wicked. At all events, I shall have
+got plenty of amusement out of it. It affords those who are in it an
+interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was
+madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to
+the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>He began to write:</p>
+
+<p>"Having been called on several occasions to attend&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier's Christian name.</p>
+
+<p>"Aim&eacute;," replied Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"Aim&eacute; Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of
+sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my
+diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases."</p>
+
+<p>He turned over the leaves of the book.</p>
+
+<p>"Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the
+eighteenth lecture, page 389: 'Many madmen are to be met with among
+actors.'
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page126" id="page126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
+
+This remark of Professor Ball's reminds me that the celebrated
+Cabanis one day asked Dr. Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a
+cause of madness."</p>
+
+<p>"Really?" asked Romilly uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a doubt of it," replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball
+says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are
+excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among
+medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are
+the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is
+the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius
+are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, a man is not a
+reasoning being merely because he is an idiot."</p>
+
+<p>After glancing a little further through the pages of Professor Ball's
+lectures, he resumed his writing:</p>
+
+<p>"Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into
+consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there
+is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity,
+which, according to the highest authorities, is merely an exaggeration
+of the habitual temperament of the individual, and hence it is not
+possible to credit him with full moral responsibility."</p>
+
+<p>He signed the sheet and handed it to Pradel, saying:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page127" id="page127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Here's something that is innocuous and too devoid of meaning to contain
+the slightest falsehood."</p>
+
+<p>Pradel rose and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Believe me, my dear doctors we should not have asked you to tell a
+lie."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? I am a medical man. I keep a lie-shop. I relieve, I console.
+How is it possible to relieve and console without lying?"</p>
+
+<p>Then, with a sympathetic glance at Nanteuil; he added:</p>
+
+<p>"Only women and physicians know how necessary untruthfulness is, and how
+beneficial to man."</p>
+
+<p>And, as Pradel, Constantin Mate, and Romilly were taking their leave, he
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Pray go out by the dining-room. I've just received a small cask of old
+Armagnac. You'll tell me what you think of it!"</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil had remained behind in the doctor's consulting room.</p>
+
+<p>"My little Socrates, I have spent an awful night. I saw him."</p>
+
+<p>"During your sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, when wide awake."</p>
+
+<p>"You are sure you were not sleeping?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite sure."</p>
+
+<p>He was on the point of asking her if the apparition had spoken to her.
+But he left the question
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page128" id="page128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+
+unspoken, fearing lest he might suggest to so
+sensitive a subject those hallucinations of the sense of hearing, which,
+by reason of their imperious nature, he dreaded far more than visual
+hallucinations. He was familiar with the docility of the sick in obeying
+orders given them by voices. Abandoning the idea of questioning F&eacute;licie,
+he resolved, at all hazards, to remove any scruples of conscience which
+might be troubling her. At the same time, having observed that,
+generally speaking, the sense of moral responsibility is weak in women,
+he made no great effort in that direction, and contented himself with
+remarking lightly:</p>
+
+<p>"My dear child, you must not consider yourself responsible for the death
+of that poor fellow. A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable
+termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits
+suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an
+accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which
+should not be exaggerated."</p>
+
+<p>Thinking that he had said enough on this score, he applied himself
+immediately to dispersing the terrors which surrounded her. He sought to
+convince her by simple arguments that she was beholding images which had
+no reality, mere reflections of her own thoughts. In order to
+illustrate
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page129" id="page129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+
+his demonstration, he told her a story of a reassuring
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>"An English physician," he told her, "was attending a lady, like
+yourself, highly intelligent, who, like yourself, was in the habit of
+seeing cats under her furniture, and was visited by phantoms. He
+convinced her that these apparitions corresponded to nothing in reality.
+She believed him, and worried herself no longer. One fine day, after a
+long period of retirement, she reappeared in society, and on entering a
+drawing-room she saw the lady of the house who, pointing to an
+arm-chair, begged her to be seated. She also saw, seated in this chair,
+a crafty-looking old gentleman. She argued to herself that one of the
+two persons was necessarily a creature of the imagination, and, deciding
+that the gentleman had no real existence, she sat down on the arm-chair.
+On touching the bottom, she drew a long breath. From that day onward,
+she never again set eyes on any further phantoms, either of man or of
+beast. When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had
+smothered them all&mdash;fundamentally."</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie shook her head, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"That does not apply to this case."</p>
+
+<p>She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on
+whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits
+without
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page130" id="page130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+
+some object. But she feared to speak of these things; and,
+letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these
+disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that
+they soon vanished without leaving any traces.</p>
+
+<p>"I myself," he said, "once had a vision."</p>
+
+<p>"You?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago. It was in Egypt."</p>
+
+<p>He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the
+story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights,
+in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the
+February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I
+proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples
+in the desert. These trips across the sands are made on donkey-back. The
+last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey
+Rameses was stronger than the others. This donkey-boy, whose name was
+Selim, was also stronger, slenderer, and better looking than the other
+donkey-boys. He was fifteen years old. His shy, gentle eyes shone from
+behind a magnificent veil of long black lashes; his brown face
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page131" id="page131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+
+was a
+pure clear-cut oval. He tramped barefoot through the desert with a step
+which made one think of those dances of warriors of which the Bible
+speaks. His every movement was graceful; his young animal-like gaiety
+was charming. As he prodded Rameses' back with the point of his stick,
+he would chatter to me in a limited vocabulary in which English, French
+and Arabic were intermingled; he enjoyed telling me of the travellers
+whom he had escorted and who, he believed, were all princes or
+princesses; but if I asked him about his relations or his companions he
+remained silent, and assumed an air of indifference and boredom. When
+cadging for a promise of substantial baksheesh, the nasal twang of his
+voice assumed caressing inflexions. He thought out subtle stratagems and
+expended whole treasuries of prayers in order to obtain a cigarette.
+Noticing that I liked to see the donkey-boys treat their beasts with
+kindness, he used, in my presence, to kiss Rameses on the nostrils, and
+when we halted he would waltz with him. He often displayed real
+ingenuity in getting what he wanted. But he was far too short-sighted
+ever to show the slightest gratitude for what he had obtained. Greedy of
+piastres, he coveted still more eagerly such small glittering articles
+as one cannot keep covered&mdash;gold scarf-pins, rings, sleeve-links, or
+nickel cigar-lighters; and when he saw a gold
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page132" id="page132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+
+chain his face would
+light up with a gleam of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>"The following summer was the hardest time of my life. An epidemic of
+cholera had broken out in Lower Egypt. I was running about the town all
+day long in a scorching atmosphere. Cairo summers are overpowering to
+Europeans. We were going through the hottest weeks I had ever known. I
+heard one day that Selim, brought before the native court of Cairo, had
+been sentenced to death. He had murdered the daughter of some fellaheen,
+a little girl nine years old, in order to rob her of her ear-rings, and
+had thrown her into a cistern. The rings, stained with blood, had been
+found under a big stone in the Valley of the Kings. They were the crude
+jewels which the Nubian nomads hammer out of shillings or two-franc
+pieces, I was told that Selim would certainly be hanged, because the
+little girl's mother refused the tendered blood-money. Now, the Khedive
+does not enjoy the prerogative of mercy, and the murderer, according to
+Moslem law, can redeem his life only if the parents of the victim
+consent to receive from him a sum of money as compensation. I was too
+busy to give thought to the matter. I could readily imagine that Selim,
+cunning but thoughtless, caressing yet unfeeling, had played with the
+little girl, torn off her ear-rings, killed her, and hidden her
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page133" id="page133">[Pg 133]</a></span>
+
+body.
+The affair soon passed out of my mind. The epidemic was spreading from
+Old Cairo to the European quarters. I was visiting from thirty to forty
+sick persons daily, practising venous injections in every case. I was
+suffering from liver trouble, an&aelig;mia was playing havoc with me, and I
+was dropping with fatigue. In order to husband my strength, I took a
+little rest at noon. I was accustomed, after luncheon, to lie down in
+the inner courtyard of my house, and there for an hour I bathed myself
+in the African shade, as dense and cool as water. One day, as I was
+lying there on a divan in my courtyard, just as I was lighting a
+cigarette, I saw Selim approaching. With his beautiful bronze arm he
+lifted the door-curtain, and came towards me in his blue robe. He did
+not speak, but smiled with his shy and innocent smile, and the deep red
+of his lips disclosed his dazzling teeth. His eyes, beneath the blue
+shadow of his eyelashes, shone with covetousness while gazing at my
+watch which lay on the table.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought he had escaped. And this surprised me, not because captives
+are strictly watched in Oriental prisons, where men, women, horses and
+dogs are herded in imperfectly closed courtyards, and guarded by a
+soldier armed with a stick. But Moslems are never tempted to flee from
+their fate. Selim knelt down with an appealing grace, and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page134" id="page134">[Pg 134]</a></span>
+
+approached
+his lips to my hand, to kiss it according to ancient custom. I was not
+asleep, and I had proof of it. I also had proof that the apparition had
+been before me only for a short time. When Selim had vanished I noticed
+that my cigarette, which was alight, was not yet tipped with ash."</p>
+
+<p>"Was he dead when you saw him?" asked Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit of it," replied the doctor, "I heard a few days later that
+Selim, in his jail, wove little baskets, or played for hours at a time
+with a chaplet of glass balls, and that he would smilingly beg a piastre
+of European visitors, who were surprised by the caressing softness of
+his eyes. Moslem justice is slow. He was hanged six months later. No
+one, not even he himself, was greatly concerned about it. I was in
+Europe at the time."</p>
+
+<p>"And since then he has never reappeared?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil looked at him, disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought he had come when he was dead. But since he was in prison you
+certainly could not have seen him in your house. You only thought you
+saw him."</p>
+
+<p>The physician, understanding what was in F&eacute;licie's mind, quickly replied:</p>
+
+<p>"My dear little Nanteuil, believe what I tell
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page135" id="page135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+
+you. The phantoms of the
+dead have no more reality than the phantoms of the living."</p>
+
+<p>Without attending to what he was saying, she asked him if it was really
+because he suffered from his liver that he had a vision. He replied that
+he believed that the bad state of his digestive organs, general fatigue,
+and a tendency to congestion, had all predisposed him to behold an
+apparition.</p>
+
+<p>"There was; I believe," he added, "a more immediate cause. Stretched
+out on my divan, my head was very low. I raised it to light a cigarette,
+and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly
+favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with
+one's head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds.
+That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster and a fat
+pillow."</p>
+
+<p>She began to laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"As mamma does&mdash;majestically!"</p>
+
+<p>Then, flitting off to another idea:</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me; Socrates, how comes it that you saw this sordid individual
+rather than another? You had hired a donkey from him, and you were no
+longer thinking of him. And yet he came. Say what you like, it's queer."</p>
+
+<p>"You ask me why it was he rather than another? It would be very hard for
+me to tell you. Our visions, bound up with our innermost
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page136" id="page136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+
+thoughts,
+often present their images to us; sometimes there is no connection
+between them, and they show us an unexpected figure."</p>
+
+<p>He once more exhorted her not to allow herself to be frightened by
+phantoms.</p>
+
+<p>"The dead do not return. When one of them appears to you, rest assured
+that what you see is a thing imagined by your brain."</p>
+
+<p>"Can you," she inquired; "guarantee that there is nothing after death?"</p>
+
+<p>"My child, there is nothing after death that could frighten you."</p>
+
+<p>She rose, picked up her little bag and her part, and held out her hand
+to the doctor, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"As for you, you don't believe in anything, do you, old Socrates?"</p>
+
+<p>He detained her for a moment in the waiting-room, warned her to take
+good care of herself, to lead a quiet, restful life, and to take
+sufficient rest.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you suppose that is easy in our profession? To-morrow I have a
+rehearsal in the green-room, and one on the stage, and I have to try on
+a gown, while to-night I am acting. For more than a year now I've been
+leading that sort of life."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page137" id="page137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/u.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="46" title="U" alt="U" />nder the great void reserved by the height of the roof for the upward
+flight of prayers the motley crowd of human beings was huddled together
+like a flock of sheep.</p>
+
+<p>They were all there, at the foot of the catafalque surrounded by lights
+and covered with flowers, Durville, old Maury, Delage, Vicar, Destr&eacute;e,
+L&eacute;on Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay,
+the manager. They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen
+Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, Louise Dalle,
+Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some
+of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping. All of them
+brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their
+heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning.
+Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans who
+gain their living by the theatre, and a crowd of curious onlookers
+filled the nave.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page138" id="page138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The choristers were uttering the mournful cries of the <i>Kyrie eleison</i>;
+the priest kissed the altar; turned towards the people and said:</p>
+
+<p><i>"Dominus vobiscum."</i></p>
+
+<p>Romilly; taking in the crowd at a glance, remarked</p>
+
+<p>"Chevalier has a full house."</p>
+
+<p>"Just look at that Louise Dalle," said Fagette. "To look as though she's
+in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!"</p>
+
+<p>A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr.
+Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his
+moral homilies.</p>
+
+<p>"Observe," he said, "that they are lighting, on the altar and about the
+coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on
+billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of
+virgin wax to the Lord. The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at
+all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions.
+This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan's."</p>
+
+<p>The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting
+in a low voice:</p>
+
+<p><i>"Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non
+contrisemimi, sicut et c&aelig;teri qui spem non habent."</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page139" id="page139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Who is taking the part of Florentin?" inquired Durville of Romilly.</p>
+
+<p>"Regnard: he'll be no worse in it than Chevalier."</p>
+
+<p>Pradel plucked Trublet by the sleeve, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Socrates, I beg you to tell me whether as a scientific man, as a
+physiologist, you see any serious objections to the immortality of the
+soul?"</p>
+
+<p>He asked the question as a busy and practical man in need of personal
+information.</p>
+
+<p>"You are doubtless aware, my dear friend," replied Trublet, "what
+Cyrano's bird said on this very subject. One day Cyrano de Bergerac
+heard two birds conversing in a tree. One of them said, 'The souls of
+birds are immortal,' 'There can be no doubt of it,' replied the other.
+'But it is inconceivable that beings who possess neither bill nor
+feathers, who have no wings and walk on two legs, should believe that
+they, like the birds, have an immortal soul.'"</p>
+
+<p>"All the same," said Pradel, "when I hear the organ, I am chock-full of
+religious ideas."</p>
+
+<p><i>"Requiem &aelig;ternam dona eis, Domine."</i></p>
+
+<p>The celebrated author of <i>La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812</i> appeared in the
+church, and no sooner had he done so than he was everywhere at one and
+the same moment&mdash;in the nave, under the porch, and in
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page140" id="page140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+
+the choir. Like
+the <i>Diable boiteux</i> he must, bestriding his crutch, have soared above
+the heads of the congregation, to pass as he did in the twinkling of an
+eye from Morlot, the deputy, who, being a freethinker, had remained in
+the parvis, to Marie-Claire kneeling at the foot of the catafalque.</p>
+
+<p>At one and at the same moment he whispered into the ears of all a few
+nimble phrases:</p>
+
+<p>"Pradel, can you imagine this fellow going and chucking his part, an
+excellent part, and running off to kill himself? A pumpkin-headed fool!
+Blows out his brains just two days before the first night. Compels us to
+replace him and sets us back a week. What an imbecile! A rotten bad egg.
+But we must do him justice; he could jump, and jump well, the animal.
+Well, my dear Romilly, we rehearse the new man to-day at two o'clock.
+See to it that Regnard has the script of his part, and that he knows how
+to climb on to the roof. Let us hope he won't kick the bucket on our
+hands like Chevalier. What if he, too, were to commit suicide! You
+needn't laugh. There's an evil spell on certain parts. Thus, in my
+<i>Marino Falieri</i>, the gondolier Sandro breaks his arm at the dress
+rehearsal. I am given another Sandro. He sprains his ankle on the first
+night. I am given a third, he contracts typhoid fever. My little
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page141" id="page141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+
+Nanteuil, I'll entrust you with a magnificent r&ocirc;le to create when you get
+to the Fran&ccedil;ais. But I have sworn by the great gods that I'll never
+again have a single play performed in this theatre."</p>
+
+<p>And immediately, under the little door which shuts off the choir on the
+right hand side of the altar, showing his friends Racine's epitaph,
+which is let into the wall, like a Parisian thoroughly conversant with
+the antiquities of his city, he recalled the history of this stone, he
+told them how the poet had been buried in accordance with his desire at
+Port-Royal-des-Champs, at the foot of Monsieur Hamon's grave, and that,
+after the destruction of the abbey and the violation of the tombs, the
+body of Messire Jean Racine, the King's secretary, Groom of the Chamber,
+had been transferred, all unhonoured; to Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont. And he
+told how the tombstone, bearing the inscription composed for Boileau,
+beneath the knight's crest and the shield with its swan argent, and done
+into Latin by Monsieur Dodart, had served as a flagstone in the choir of
+the little church of Magny-Lessart; where it had been discovered in
+1808.</p>
+
+<p>"There it is," he added. "It was broken in six pieces and the name of
+Racine was effaced by the shoes of the peasants. The fragments were
+pieced together and the missing letters carved anew."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page142" id="page142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On this subject he expatiated with his customary vivacity and
+diffusiveness, drawing from his prodigious memory a multitude of curious
+facts and amusing anecdotes, breathing life into history and endowing
+arch&aelig;ology with a living interest. His admiration and his wrath burst
+forth in swift and violent alternation in the solemnity of the church,
+and amid the pomp of the ceremony.</p>
+
+<p>"I would give something to know, for instance, who were the stupid
+bunglers who set this stone in the wall. <i>Hic jacet nobilis vir Johannes
+Racine.</i> It is not true! They make honest Boileau's epitaph lie. The
+body of Racine is not in this spot. It was laid to rest in the third
+chapel on the left, as you enter. What idiots!" Then, suddenly calm, he
+pointed to Pascal's tombstone.</p>
+
+<p>"That came here from the museum of the Petits-Augustins. No praise can
+be too great for Lenoir, who, in the days of the Revolution, collected
+and preserved."</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon, he improvised a second lecture on lapidary arch&aelig;ology, even
+more brilliant than the first, transformed the history of Pascal's life
+into a terrible yet amusing drama, and vanished. In all, he had remained
+in the church for the space of ten minutes.</p>
+
+<p>Over those heads full of worldly cares and profane desires the <i>Dies
+ir&aelig;</i> rumbled like a storm:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page143" id="page143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="blockquot"><i>"Mors stupebit et natura,<br />
+Quum resurget creatura<br />
+Judicanti responsura."</i></p>
+
+<p>"Tell me, Dutil, how could that little Nanteuil, who is pretty and
+intelligent, get herself mixed up with a dirty mummer like Chevalier?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your ignorance of the feminine heart surprises me."</p>
+
+<p>"Herschell was prettier when she was a brunette."</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot"><i>"Qui Mariam absolvisti<br />
+Et latronem exaudisti<br />
+Mihi quoque spem dedisti."</i></p>
+
+<p>"I must be off to lunch."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know anyone who knows the Minister?"</p>
+
+<p>"Durville is a has-been. He blows like a grampus."</p>
+
+<p>"Put me in a little paragraph about Marie Falempin. I can tell you she
+was simply delicious in <i>Les Trois Magots</i>."</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot"><i>"Inter oves locum presta<br />
+Et ab h&aelig;dis me sequestra,<br />
+Statuens in parte dextra."</i></p>
+
+<p>"So then, it is for Nanteuil's sake that he blew out his brains? A
+little ninny who isn't worth spanking!"</p>
+
+<p>The celebrant poured the wine and the water into the chance, saying:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page144" id="page144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>"Deus qui human&aelig; substanti&aelig; dignitatem mirabiliter condidisu...."</i></p>
+
+<p>"Is it really true, doctor, that he killed himself because Nanteuil
+wouldn't have any more to do with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He killed himself," replied Trublet, "because she loved another. The
+obsession of genetic images frequently determines mania and
+melancholia."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand second-rate actors, Dr. Socrates," said Pradel. "He
+killed himself to cause a sensation, and for no other reason."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not only second-rate actors," said Constantin Marc, "who suffer
+from an uncontrollable desire to attract attention to themselves at
+whatever cost. Last year, in the place where I live, Saint-Bartholom&eacute;,
+while a threshing-machine was at work, a thirteen-year-old boy shoved
+his arm into the gear; it was crushed up to the shoulder. The surgeon
+who amputated it asked him, as he was dressing the stump, why he
+mutilated himself like that. The boy confessed that it was to draw
+attention to himself."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Nanteuil, with dry eyes and pursed lips, had fixed her eyes
+upon the black cloth with which the catafalque was covered, and was
+impatiently waiting until enough holy water, candles and Latin prayers
+should be bestowed upon the dead man for him to depart in peace. She
+had
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page145" id="page145">[Pg 145]</a></span>
+
+seen him again the night before, and she thought he had returned
+because the priests had not yet bidden him to rest in peace. Then,
+reflecting that one day she, too, would die, and would, like him, be
+laid in a coffin, beneath a black pall, she shuddered with horror and
+closed her eyes. The idea of life was so strong within her that she
+pictured death as a hideous life. Afraid of death, she prayed for a long
+life. Kneeling, with bowed head, the voluptuous ashen cloud of her
+buoyant hair falling over her forehead, she, a profane penitent, was
+reading in her prayer-book words which reassured her, although she did
+not understand them.</p>
+
+<p>"Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful
+dead from the pains of hell and from the depths of the bottomless pit.
+Deliver them from the lion's jaws. Let them not be plunged into hell,
+and let them not fall into the outer darkness, but suffer that St.
+Michael, the Prince of Angels, lead them to the holy light promised by
+Thee to Abraham and to his posterity."</p>
+
+<p>At the Elevation of the Host the congregation, permeated by a vague
+impression that the mystery was becoming more sacred, ceased its private
+conversations, and assumed a certain appearance of reverent devotion.
+And as the organ fell silent all heads were bowed at the tinkling of a
+little
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page146" id="page146">[Pg 146]</a></span>
+
+bell which was shaken by a child. Then, after the last Gospel,
+when, the service being over, the priest, attended by his acolytes,
+approached the catafalque to the chanting of the <i>Libera</i>, a sense of
+relief was experienced by the crowd, and they began to jostle one
+another a little in order to file past the coffin. The women, whose
+piety, grief and contrition were contingent upon their immobility and
+their kneeling posture, were at once recalled to their customary frame
+of mind by the movement and the encounters of the procession. They
+exchanged amongst themselves and with the men remarks relating to their
+profession.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know," said Ellen Midi to Falempin, "that Nanteuil is going to
+join the Com&eacute;die-Fran&ccedil;aise?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's not possible!"</p>
+
+<p>"The contract is signed."</p>
+
+<p>"How did she manage it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not by her acting, you may be sure," replied Ellen, who proceeded to
+relate a highly scandalous story.</p>
+
+<p>"Take care," said Falempin, "she is just behind you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I see her! She's got a cheek of her own to show herself here,
+don't you think?"</p>
+
+<p>Marie-Claire whispered an extraordinary piece of news into Durville's
+ear:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page147" id="page147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"They say he committed suicide. Well, there's not a word of truth in it
+He didn't commit suicide at all. And the proof of it is that he is being
+buried with the rites of the Church."</p>
+
+<p>"What then?" inquired Durville.</p>
+
+<p>"Monsieur de Ligny surprised him with Nanteuil and killed him."</p>
+
+<p>"Come, come!"</p>
+
+<p>"I can assure you that I am accurately informed."</p>
+
+<p>The conversations were becoming animated and familiar.</p>
+
+<p>"So you are here, you wicked old sinner!"</p>
+
+<p>"The box-office receipts are falling off already."</p>
+
+<p>"Stella has succeeded in getting herself proposed by seventeen Deputies,
+nine of whom are members of the Budget Commission."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet I told Herschell, 'That little Bocquet fellow isn't the man for you.
+What you need is a man of standing.'"</p>
+
+<p>When the bier, borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west
+door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women
+and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis,
+a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces of celebrities;
+the little factory girls from the neighbouring workshops, standing in
+couples with arms round each other's
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page148" id="page148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+
+waists, contemplated the
+actresses' dresses. And standing against the porch on their aching feet,
+a couple of tramps, accustomed to living under the open sky, whether
+mild or sullen, slowly shifted their dejected gaze, while a college lad
+gazed with rapture at the fiery tresses which coiled like flames on the
+nape of Fagette's neck.</p>
+
+<p>She had stopped on the topmost step in front of the doors, and was
+chatting with Constantin Marc and a few journalists:</p>
+
+<p>"...Monsieur de Ligny? He danced attendance upon me long before he knew
+Nanteuil. He used to gaze upon me by the hour, with eager eyes, without
+daring to speak a word to me. I received him willingly enough, for his
+behaviour was perfect. It is only fair to say that his manners are
+excellent. He was as reserved as a man could be. At last, one day, he
+declared that he was madly in love with me. I told him that as he was
+speaking to me seriously I would do the same; that I was truly sorry to
+see him in such a state; that every time such a thing happened I was
+greatly upset by it; that I was a woman of standing, I had settled my
+life, and could do nothing for him. He was desperate. He informed me
+that he was leaving for Constantinople, that he would never return. He
+couldn't make up his mind either to remain or to go away. He fell ill.
+Nanteuil, who
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page149" id="page149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+
+thought I loved him and wanted to keep him, did all in
+her power to get him away from me. She flung herself at his head in the
+craziest fashion, I found her sometimes a trifle ridiculous, but, as you
+may imagine, I did not place any obstacle in her path. For his part,
+Monsieur de Ligny, with the object of inspiring me with regret, with
+vexation, or what not, perhaps in the hope of making me jealous,
+responded very visibly to Nanteuil's advances. And that is how they came
+to be together. I was delighted. Nanteuil and I are the best of
+friends."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Doulce, hedged in on either side by the onlookers, came slowly
+down the steps, indulging herself in the illusion that the crowd was
+whispering, "That's Doulce!"</p>
+
+<p>She seized Nanteuil as she was passing, pressed her to her bosom, and
+with a beautiful gesture of Christian charity enveloped her in her
+mantle, saying through her sobs:</p>
+
+<p>"Try to pray, my child, and accept this medal. It has been blessed by
+the Pope. A Dominican Father gave it to me."</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil, who was a little out of breath, but was growing young
+again since she had renewed her experience of love, was the last to come
+out. Durville pressed her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor Chevalier!" he murmured.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page150" id="page150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"His was not a bad character," answered Madame Nanteuil, "but he showed
+a lack of tact. A man of the world does not commit suicide in such a
+manner. Poor boy, he had no breeding."</p>
+
+<p>The hearse began its journey in the colossal shadow of the Panth&eacute;on, and
+proceeded down the Rue Soufflet, which is lined on both sides with
+booksellers' shops. Chevalier's fellow-players, the employ&eacute;s of the
+theatre, the director, Dr. Socrates, Constantin Marc, a few journalists
+and a few inquisitive onlookers followed. The clergy and the actresses
+took their seats in the mourning coaches. Nanteuil, disregarding Madame
+Doulce's advice, followed with Fagette, in a hired coup&eacute;.</p>
+
+<p>The weather was fine. Behind the hearse the mourners were conversing in
+familiar fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"The cemetery is the devil of a way!"</p>
+
+<p>"Montparnasse? Half an hour at the outside."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know Nanteuil is engaged at the Com&eacute;die-Fran&ccedil;aise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do we rehearse to-day?" Constantin Marc inquired of Romilly.</p>
+
+<p>"To be sure we do, at three o'clock, in the green-room. We shall
+rehearse till five. I am playing to-night; I am playing to-morrow; on
+Sunday I play both afternoon and evening. Work is never over for us
+actors; one is always beginning over again, always putting one's
+shoulder to the wheel."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page151" id="page151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Adolphe Meunier, the poet, laying his hand on his shoulder said:</p>
+
+<p>"Everything going well, Romilly?"</p>
+
+<p>"How are you getting on yourself, Meunier? Always rolling the rock of
+Sisyphus. That would be nothing, but success does not depend on us
+alone. If the play is bad and falls flat, all that we have put into it,
+our work, our talent, a bit of our own life, collapses with it. And the
+number of 'frosts' I've seen! How often the play has fallen under me
+like an old hack, and has chucked me into the gutter! Ah, if one were
+punished only for one's own sins!"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Romilly," replied Meunier sharply, "do you imagine that the
+fate of dramatic authors like myself does not depend as much upon the
+actors as upon ourselves? Do you think it never happens that actors, by
+their carelessness or clumsiness, ruin a work which was meant to reach
+the heights? And do not we also, like C&aelig;sar's legionary, become seized
+with dismay and anguish at the thought that our fate is not assured by
+our own valour, but that it depends on those who fight beside us?"</p>
+
+<p>"Such is life," observed Constantin Marc. "In every undertaking,
+everywhere and always, we pay for the faults of others."</p>
+
+<p>"That is only too true," resumed Meunier, who had just seen his lyric
+drama, <i>Pandolphe et Clarimonde</i>,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page152" id="page152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+
+come hopelessly to grief. "But the
+iniquity of it disgusts us."</p>
+
+<p>"It should not disgust us in the least," replied Constantin Marc. "There
+is a sacred law which governs the world, which we are forced to obey,
+which we are proud to worship. It is injustice, holy injustice, august
+injustice. It is everywhere blessed under the name of happiness,
+fortune, genius and grace. It is a weakness not to acknowledge it and to
+venerate it under its true name."</p>
+
+<p>"That's rather weird, what you have just said!" remarked the gentle
+Meunier.</p>
+
+<p>"Think it over," resumed Constantin Marc. "You, too, belong yourself to
+the party of injustice, for you are striving for distinction, and you
+very reasonably want to throttle your competitors, a natural, unjust and
+legitimate desire. Do you know of anything more stupid or more odious
+than the sort of people we have seen demanding justice? Public opinion,
+which is not, however, remarkable for its intelligence, and common
+sense, which nevertheless is not a superior sense, have felt that they
+constituted the precise contrary of nature, society and life."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so," said Meunier, "but justice&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Justice is nothing but the dream of a few simpletons. Injustice is the
+thought of God Himself. The doctrine of original sin would alone
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page153" id="page153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+
+suffice to make me a Christian, while the doctrine of grace embodies all
+truths divine and human."</p>
+
+<p>"Then are you a believer?" asked Romilly respectfully.</p>
+
+<p>"No, but I should like to be. I regard faith as the most precious
+possession which a man can enjoy in this world. At Saint-Bartholom&eacute;, I
+go to Mass every Sunday and feast day, and I have never once listened to
+the exposition of the Gospel by the <i>cur&eacute;</i> without saying to myself: 'I
+would give all I possess, my house, my acres, my woods, to be as stupid
+as that animal there.'"</p>
+
+<p>Michel, the young painter with the mystic's beard, was saying to Roget,
+the scene painter:</p>
+
+<p>"That poor Chevalier was a man with ideas. But they were not all good
+ones. One evening, he walked into the <i>brasserie</i> radiant and
+transfigured, sat himself beside us, and twirling his old felt hat
+between his long red fingers, he cried: 'I have discovered the true
+manner of acting tragedy. Hitherto no one has realized how to act
+tragedy, no one, you understand!' And he told us what his discovery was.
+'I've just come from the Chamber. They made me climb up to the
+amphitheatre. I could see the Deputies swarming like black insects at
+the bottom of a pit. Suddenly a stumpy little man mounted the tribune.
+He looked
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page154" id="page154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+
+as if he were carrying a sack of coals on his back. He threw
+out his arms and clenched his fists. By Jove, he was comical! He had a
+Southern accent, and his delivery was full of defects. He spoke of the
+workers, of the proletariat, of social justice. It was magnificent; his
+voice, his gestures gripped one's very bowels; the applause nearly
+brought the house down. I said to myself "What he is doing, I'll do on
+the stage, and I'll do it better. I, a comic actor, will play tragedy.
+Great tragedy parts, if they are to produce their true effect, ought to
+be played by a comedian, but he must have a soul."' The poor fellow
+actually thought that he had imagined a new form of art. 'You'll see,'
+he said."</p>
+
+<p>At the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, a journalist came up to
+Meunier, and asked him:</p>
+
+<p>"Is it true that Robert de Ligny was at one time madly in love with
+Fagette?"</p>
+
+<p>"If he's in love with her, he hasn't been so long. Only a fortnight ago
+he asked me, in the theatre, 'Who is that little fair-haired woman?' and
+he pointed to Fagette."</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot understand," said the chronicler of an evening paper to a
+chronicler of a morning paper, "what can be the origin of our mania for
+calumniating humanity. I am amazed, on the other hand, by the number of
+decent people I come across.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page155" id="page155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
+
+It is enough to make one incline to the
+belief that men are ashamed of the good they do, and that they conceal
+themselves when performing acts of devotion and generosity. Don't you
+think that is so?"</p>
+
+<p>"As far as I am concerned," replied the chronicler of the morning paper,
+"every time I have opened a door by mistake&mdash;I mean this both literally
+and metaphorically&mdash;I have always come across some unsuspected baseness.
+Were society suddenly turned inside out like a glove, so that one could
+see the inside, we should all faint away with horror and disgust."</p>
+
+<p>"Some time ago," said Roger to the painter Michel, "I used to know
+Chevalier's uncle on the Butte de Montmartre. He was a photographer who
+dressed like an astrologer. A crazy old fellow, always sending one
+customer the portrait of another. The customers used to complain. But
+not all of them. There were even some who thought the portraits were a
+good likeness."</p>
+
+<p>"What has become of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He went bankrupt and hanged himself."</p>
+
+<p>In the Boulevard Saint-Michel Pradel, who was walking beside Trublet,
+was still profiting by the opportunity of obtaining information as to
+the immortality of the soul and the fate of man after death. He obtained
+nothing that seemed to him sufficiently positive and repeated:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page156" id="page156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I should like to know."</p>
+
+<p>To which Dr. Socrates replied:</p>
+
+<p>"Men were not made to know; men were not made to understand. They do not
+possess the necessary faculties. A man's brain is larger and richer in
+convolutions than that of a gorilla, but there is no essential
+difference between the two. Our highest thoughts and our most
+comprehensive systems will never be anything more than the magnificent
+extension of the ideas contained in the head of a monkey. We know more
+about the world than the dog does, and this flatters and entertains us;
+but it is very little in itself, and our illusions increase with our
+knowledge."</p>
+
+<p>But Pradel was not listening. He was mentally rehearsing the speech
+which he had to deliver at Chevalier's grave.</p>
+
+<p>When the funeral procession turned towards the shabby grass-plots which
+overflow the Avenue de l'Observatoire, the tram-cars, out of respect for
+the dead, made way for it.</p>
+
+<p>Trublet remarked upon this.</p>
+
+<p>"Men," he said, "respect death, since they rightly believe that, if it
+is respectable to die, every one is assured of being respectable in
+that, at least."</p>
+
+<p>The actors were excitedly discussing Chevalier's death. Durville,
+mysteriously, and in a deep voice, disclosed the tragedy:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page157" id="page157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It is not a case of suicide. It is a crime of passion. Monsieur de
+Ligny surprised Chevalier with Nanteuil. He fired seven revolver shots
+at him. Two bullets struck our unfortunate comrade in the head and the
+chest, four went wide, and the fifth grazed Nanteuil below the left
+breast."</p>
+
+<p>"Is Nanteuil wounded?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only slightly."</p>
+
+<p>"Will Monsieur de Ligny be arrested?"</p>
+
+<p>"The affair is to be hushed up, and rightly so. I have, however, the best
+authority for what I say."</p>
+
+<p>In the carriages, too, the actresses were engaged in spreading various
+reports. Some felt sure it was a case of murder; others, one of suicide.</p>
+
+<p>"He shot himself in the chest with a revolver," asserted Falempin. "But
+he only succeeded in wounding himself. The doctor said that if he had
+been attended to in time he might have been saved. But they left him
+lying on the floor, bathed in blood."</p>
+
+<p>And Madame Doulce said to Ellen Midi:</p>
+
+<p>"It has often been my fate to stand beside a deathbed. I always go down
+on my knees and pray. I at once feel myself invaded by a heavenly
+serenity."</p>
+
+<p>"You are indeed fortunate!" replied Ellen Midi.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the Rue Campagne-Premi&egrave;re, on the wide grey boulevards,
+they became conscious
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page158" id="page158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+
+of the length of the road which they had covered,
+and the melancholy nature of the journey. They felt that while following
+the coffin they had crossed the confines of life, and were already in
+the country of the dead. On their right stretched the yards of the
+marble-workers, the florists' shops which supplied wreaths for funerals,
+displays of potted flowers, and the economical furniture of tombs, zinc
+flower-stands, wreaths of immortelles in cement, and guardian angels in
+plaster. On their left, they could see behind the low wall of the
+cemetery the white crosses rising among the bare tops of the lime-trees,
+and everywhere, in the wan dust, they breathed death, commonplace,
+uniform deaths under the administration of City and State, and poorly
+embellished by the pious hands of relations.</p>
+
+<p>They passed between two massive pillars of stone surmounted by winged
+hour-glasses. The hearse advanced slowly on the gravel which creaked in
+the silence. It seemed, amid the homes of the dead, to be twice as tall
+as before. The mourners read the famous names on some of the tombs, or
+gazed at the statue of a young girl, seated, book in hand. Old Maury
+deciphered, in the inscriptions, the age of the deceased. Short lives,
+and even more lives of average duration, distressed him as being of ill
+omen. But, when he encountered those of the dead who were notable for
+the length of their
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page159" id="page159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+
+years, he joyfully drew from them the hope and
+probability of a long lease of life.</p>
+
+<p>The hearse stopped in the middle of a side alley. The clergy and the
+women stepped out of the coaches. Delage received in his arms, from the
+top of the carriage steps, the worthy Madame Ravaud, who was getting a
+little ponderous, and of a sudden, half in jest, half in earnest, he
+made certain proposals to her. She was no longer young, having been on
+the stage for half a century. Delage, with his twenty-five years, looked
+upon her as prodigiously old. Yet, as he whispered into her ear, he felt
+excited, infatuated, he became sincere, he really desired her, out of
+perverse curiosity, because he wanted to do something extraordinary, and
+was certain that he would be able to do it, perhaps because of his
+professional instinct as a handsome youth, and, lastly, because, in the
+first place having asked for what he did not want, he began to want what
+he had asked for. Madame Ravaud, indignant but flattered, made good her
+escape.</p>
+
+<p>The coffin was carried along a narrow path bordered with dwarf
+cypresses, amid a murmuring of prayers:</p>
+
+<p><i>"In paradisum deducant te Angeli, in tuo adventu susciptant te Martyres
+et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem, Chorus Angelorum te
+suscipiat et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere, &aelig;ternam habeas requiem."</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page160" id="page160">[Pg 160]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Soon there was no longer any visible path. It was necessary, in
+following the quickly vanishing coffin, the priests and the choristers,
+to scatter, striding over the recumbent tombstones, and slipping between
+the broken columns and upright slabs. They lost the coffin and found it
+again. Nanteuil evinced a certain eagerness in her pursuit of it,
+anxious and abrupt, her prayer-book in her hand, freeing her skirt as it
+caught on the railings, and brushing past the withered wreaths which
+left the heads of immortelles adhering to her gown. Finally, the first
+to reach the graveside smelt the acrid odour of the freshly turned soil,
+and from the heights of the neighbouring flagstones saw the grave into
+which the coffin was being lowered.</p>
+
+<p>The actors had contributed liberally to the expenses of the funeral;
+they had clubbed together to buy for their comrade as much earth as he
+needed, two metres granted for five years. Romilly, on behalf of the
+actors of the Od&eacute;on, had paid the cemetery board 300 francs&mdash;to be
+exact, 301 fr. 80 centimes. He had even made plans for a monument, a
+broken stele with comedy masks suspended upon it. But no decision had
+been come to on this point.</p>
+
+<p>The celebrant blessed the open grave. And the priest and the boy
+choristers murmured the responses:</p>
+
+<p>"Requiem &aelig;ternam dona ei, Domine."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page161" id="page161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"Requiescat in pace."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"Amen."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"Anima ejus et anim&aelig; omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam
+Dei, requiescant in pace."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"Amen."</i></p>
+
+<p><i>"De profundis...."</i></p>
+
+<p>Each one of those present came forward to sprinkle holy water on the
+coffin. Nanteuil stood watching it all, the prayers, the spadefuls of
+earth, the sprinkling; then, kneeling apart on the corner of a tomb, she
+fervently recited "Our Father who art in heaven...."</p>
+
+<p>Pradel spoke at the graveside. He refrained from making a speech. But
+the Th&eacute;&acirc;tre de l'Od&eacute;on could not allow a young artist beloved of all to
+depart without a word of farewell.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall speak therefore, in the name of the great and true-hearted
+dramatic family, the words that are in every bosom."</p>
+
+<p>Grouped about the speaker in studied attitudes, the actors listened with
+profound knowledge. They listened actively, with their ears, lips, eyes,
+arms, and legs. Each listened in his own manner, with nobility,
+simplicity, grief or rebelliousness, according to the parts which the
+actor was accustomed to play.</p>
+
+<p>No, the director of the theatre would not suffer the valiant actor, who,
+in the course of his only too
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page162" id="page162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+
+brief career, had shown more than
+promise, to depart without a word of farewell.</p>
+
+<p>"Chevalier, impetuous, uneven, restless, imparted to his creations an
+individual character, a distinctive physiognomy. We saw him a very few
+days ago&mdash;a few hours ago, I might say&mdash;bring an episodical character
+into powerful relief. The author of the play was struck by the
+performance. Chevalier was on the verge of success. The sacred flame was
+his. There are those who have asked, what was the cause of so cruel an
+end? Let us not seek for that cause. Chevalier died of his art; he died
+of dramatic fever. He died consumed by the flame which is slowly
+consuming all of us. Alas, the stage, of which the public sees only the
+smiles, and the tears, as sweet as the smiles, is a jealous master which
+demands of its servants an absolute devotion and the most painful
+sacrifices, and, at times, claims its victims. In the name of all your
+comrades, farewell, Chevalier, farewell!"</p>
+
+<p>The handkerchiefs were at work, wiping away the mourners' tears. The
+actors were weeping with all sincerity; they were weeping for
+themselves.</p>
+
+<p>After they had slipped away, Dr. Trublet, left alone in the cemetery
+with Constantin Marc, took in the multitude of graves with a glance.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember," he said, "one of Auguste Comte's reflections:
+'Humanity is composed of the
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page163" id="page163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+
+dead and the living. The dead are by far
+the more numerous.' Assuredly, the dead are by far the more numerous. By
+the multitudinous numbers and the magnitude of their work, they are more
+powerful. It's they who rule; we obey them. Our masters lie beneath
+these stones. Here is the lawgiver who made the law to which I submit
+to-day; the architect who built my house, the poet who created the
+illusions which still disturb us; the orator who swayed us before our
+birth. Here are all the artisans of our knowledge, true or false, of our
+wisdom and of our follies. There they lie, the inexorable leaders, whom
+we dare not disobey. In them dwells strength, continuity, and duration.
+What does a generation of living folk amount to, in comparison with the
+numberless generations of the dead? What is our will of a day before the
+will of a thousand centuries? Can we rebel against them? Why, we have
+not even time to disobey them!"</p>
+
+<p>"At last you are coming to the point, Dr. Socrates!" said Constantin
+Marc. "You renounce progress, the new justice, the peace of the world,
+freedom of thought; you submit to tradition. You consent to the ancient
+error, the good old-fashioned ignorance, the venerable iniquity of our
+forbears. You withdraw into the French tradition, you submit to ancient
+custom, to the authority of our ancestors."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page164" id="page164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Whence do you obtain custom and tradition?" asked Trablet. "Whence do
+you receive authority? There are irreconcilable traditions, diverse
+customs; and opposed authorities. The dead do not impose any one will
+upon us. They subject us to contradictory wills. The opinions of the
+past which weigh upon us are uncertain and confused. In crushing us they
+destroy one another. All these dead have lived, like ourselves, in the
+midst of disorder and contradiction. Each in his time, in his own
+fashion, in hatred or in love, has dreamed the dream of life. Let us in
+our turn dream this dream with kindness and joy, if it be possible, and
+let us go to lunch. I am taking you to a little tavern in the Rue Vavin,
+kept by Cl&eacute;mence, who cooks only one dish, but a marvellous one at that,
+the Castelnaudary <i>cassoulet</i>, not to be confused with the <i>cassoulet</i>
+prepared in the Carcassonne fashion, which is merely a leg of mutton
+with haricot beans. The <i>cassoulet</i> of Castelnaudary comprises pickled
+goose legs, haricot beans that have been previously bleached, bacon, and
+a small sausage. To be good, it must be cooked for a long time over a
+slow fire. Cl&eacute;mence's <i>cassoulet</i> has been cooking for twenty years.
+From time to time she puts in the saucepan, now a little bit of goose or
+bacon, now a sausage or some haricots, but it is always the same
+<i>cassoulet</i>. The stock remains, and this ancient and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page165" id="page165">[Pg 165]</a></span>
+
+precious stock
+gives it the flavour which, in the pictures of the old Venetian masters,
+one finds in the amber-coloured flesh of the women. Come, I want you to
+taste Cl&eacute;mence's <i>cassoulet</i>."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page166" id="page166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/h.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="46" title="H" alt="H" />aving said her prayer, Nanteuil, without waiting to hear Pradel's
+speech, jumped into a carriage in order to join Robert de Ligny, who was
+waiting for her in front of the Montparnasse railway station. Amid the
+throng of passers-by they shook hands, gazing at one another without a
+word. More than ever did they feel that they were bound together. Robert
+loved her.</p>
+
+<p>He loved her without knowing it. She was for him, or so he believed,
+merely one delight in the infinite series of possible delights. But
+delight had assumed for him the form of F&eacute;licie, and, had he reflected
+more deeply upon the innumerable women whom he promised himself in the
+vast remainder of his newly begun life, he would have recognized that
+now they were all F&eacute;licies. He might at least have realized that,
+without having any intention of being faithful to her, he did not dream
+of being unfaithful, and that since she had given herself to him he had
+not desired any other woman. But he did not realize it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page167" id="page167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>On this occasion, however, standing in the bustling commonplace square,
+on seeing her no longer in the voluptuous shadow of night, nor under the
+caressing glimmer of the alcove which gave her naked form the delicious
+vagueness of a Milky Way, but in a harsh, diffused daylight, by the
+circumstantial illumination of a sunlight devoid of splendour and
+without shadows, which revealed beneath her veil her eyelids that were
+seared with tears, her pearly cheeks and roughened lips, he realized
+that he felt for this woman's flesh a profound and mysterious
+inclination.</p>
+
+<p>He did not question her. They exchanged only tender trivial phrases.
+And, as she was very hungry, he took her to lunch at a well-known
+<i>cabaret</i> whose name shone in letters of gold on one of the old houses
+in the square. They had their meal served in the winter-garden, whose
+rockery, fountain, and solitary tree were multiplied by mirrors framed
+in a green trellis. When seated at the table, consulting the bill of
+fare, they conversed with less restraint than heretofore. He told her
+that the emotions and worries of the past three days had unstrung his
+nerves, but he no longer thought about it, and it would be absurd to
+worry about the matter any further. She spoke to him of her health,
+complaining that she could not sleep, save for a restless slumber full
+of dreams. But she did not tell him what she saw
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page168" id="page168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+
+in those dreams, and
+she avoided speaking of the dead man. He asked her if she had not spent
+a tiring morning, and why she had gone to the cemetery, a useless
+proceeding.</p>
+
+<p>Incapable of explaining to him the depths of her soul, submissive to
+rites and propitiatory ceremonies and incantations, she shook her head
+as if to say:</p>
+
+<p>"Had to."</p>
+
+<p>While those lunching at the adjoining tables were finishing their meal,
+they talked for a long time, both in subdued tones, while waiting to be
+served.</p>
+
+<p>Robert had promised himself, had sworn indeed never to reproach F&eacute;licie
+for having had Chevalier for her lover, or even to ask her a single
+question in this connection. And yet, moved by some obscure resentment,
+by an ebullition of ill-temper or natural curiosity, and also because he
+loved her too deeply to control himself, he said to her, with bitterness
+in his voice:</p>
+
+<p>"You were on intimate terms with him, formerly."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent, and did not deny the fact. Not that she felt that it was
+henceforth useless to lie. On the contrary, she was in the habit of
+denying the obvious truth, and she had, of course, too much knowledge of
+men to be ignorant of the fact that, when in love, there is no lie,
+however clumsy,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page169" id="page169">[Pg 169]</a></span>
+
+which they cannot believe if they wish to do so. But on
+this occasion, contrary to her nature and habit, she refrained from
+lying. She was afraid of offending the dead. She imagined that in
+denying him she would be doing him a wrong, depriving him of his share,
+angering him. She held her peace, fearing to see him come and rest his
+elbows on the table, with his fixed smile and the hole in his head, and
+to hear him say in his plaintive voice. "F&eacute;licie, you surely cannot have
+forgotten our little room, in the Rue des Martyrs?"</p>
+
+<p>What he had become, for her, since his death, she could not have said,
+so alien was it to her beliefs, so contrary to her reason, and so
+antiquated, ridiculous and obsolete did the words which would have
+expressed her feeling seem to her. But from some remote inherited
+instinct, or more likely from certain tales which she had heard in her
+childhood, she derived a confused idea that he was of the number of
+those dead who in the days of old were wont to torment the living, and
+were exorcised by the priests; for upon thinking of him she
+instinctively began to make the sign of the cross, and she checked
+herself only that she might not seem ridiculous.</p>
+
+<p>Ligny, seeing her melancholy and distracted, blamed himself for his
+harsh and useless words, while at the very moment of reproaching
+himself
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page170" id="page170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+
+for them he followed them by others equally harsh and equally
+useless.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you told me it was not true!"</p>
+
+<p>She replied, fervently:</p>
+
+<p>"Because, don't you see, I wanted it not to be true."</p>
+
+<p>She added:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my darling, since I've been yours, I swear to you that I've not
+belonged to anyone else. I don't claim any merit for this; I should have
+found it impossible."</p>
+
+<p>Like the young of animals, she had need of gaiety. The wine, which shone
+in her glass like liquid amber, was a joy to her eyes, and she moistened
+her tongue with it with luxurious pleasure. She took an interest in the
+dishes set before her, and especially in the <i>pommes de terre
+souffl&eacute;es</i>, like golden blisters. Next she watched the people lunching
+at the tables in the dining-room, attributing to them, according to
+their appearance, ridiculous opinions or grotesque passions. She noticed
+the ill-natured glances which the women directed toward her, and the
+efforts of the men to appear handsome and important. And she gave
+utterance to a general reflection:</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, have you noticed that people are never natural? They do not say
+a thing because they think it. They say it because they think it is
+what
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page171" id="page171">[Pg 171]</a></span>
+
+they ought to say. This habit makes them very wearisome. And it is
+extremely rare to find anyone who is natural. You, you are natural."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't think I'm guilty of posing."</p>
+
+<p>"You pose like the rest. But you pose in your own character. I can see
+perfectly well when you are trying to surprise and impress me."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke to him of himself and, led back by an involuntary train of
+thought to the tragedy enacted at Neuilly, she inquired:</p>
+
+<p>"Did your mother say anything to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Yet she must have known."</p>
+
+<p>"It is probable."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you on good terms with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"They say she is still very beautiful, your mother, is it so?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer her and sought to change the conversation. He did not
+like F&eacute;licie to speak to him of his mother, or to turn her attention to
+his family. Monsieur and Madame de Ligny enjoyed the highest
+consideration in Parisian society. Monsieur de Ligny, a diplomatist by
+birth and by profession, was in himself a person worthy of the greatest
+consideration. He was so even before his birth, by virtue of the
+diplomatic services which his ancestors had rendered to France. His
+great-grandfather
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page172" id="page172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+
+had signed the surrender of Pondicherry to England.
+Madame de Ligny lived with her husband on the most correct terms. But,
+although she had no money of her own, she lived in great style, and her
+gowns were one of the greatest glories of France. She received intimate
+visits from an ex-Ambassador. His age, his position, his opinions, his
+titles, and his great fortune made the connection respectable. Madame de
+Ligny kept the ladies of the Republic at arm's length, and, when the
+spirit moved her, gave them lessons in decorum. She had nothing to fear
+from the opinion of the fashionable world. Robert knew that she was
+looked upon with respect by people in society. But he was continually
+dreading that, in speaking of her, F&eacute;licie might fail to do so with all
+the needful reserve. He feared lest, not being in society, she might say
+that which had better have been left unsaid. He was wrong; F&eacute;licie knew
+nothing of the private life of Madame de Ligny; moreover, had she known
+of it, she would not have blamed her. The lady inspired her with a naive
+curiosity and an admiration mingled with fear. Since her lover was
+unwilling to speak to her of his mother, she attributed his reserve to a
+certain aristocratic arrogance, even to a lack of consideration, for
+her, at which the pride of the freewoman and the plebeian was up in
+arms. She was wont to say to him tartly:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page173" id="page173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I'm perfectly free to speak of your mother." The first time she had
+added: "Mine is just as good as yours." But she had realized that the
+remark was vulgar, and she had not repeated it.</p>
+
+<p>The dining-room was now empty. She looked at her watch, and saw that it
+was three o'clock.</p>
+
+<p>"I must be off," she said. "<i>La Grille</i> is being rehearsed this
+afternoon. Constantin Marc ought to be at the theatre already. There's
+another queer fellow for you! He boasts that when he's in the Vivarais
+he ruins all the women. And yet he is so shy that he daren't even talk
+to Fagette and Falempin. I frighten him. It amuses me."</p>
+
+<p>She was so tired that she had not the courage to rise.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it queer? They are saying everywhere that I'm engaged for the
+Fran&ccedil;ais, it's not true. There's not even a question of it. Of course, I
+can't remain indefinitely where I am. In the long run one would get
+besotted there. But there is no hurry. I have a great part to create in
+<i>La Grille</i>. We shall see after that. What I want is to play comedy. I
+don't want to join the Fran&ccedil;ais and then to do nothing."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, gazing in front of her with eyes full of terror, she flung
+herself backwards, turned pale, and uttered a shrill scream. Then her
+eyelids fluttered, and she murmured that she could not breathe.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page174" id="page174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Robert loosened her jacket, and moistened her temples with a little
+water.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"A priest! I saw a priest. He was in his surplice. His lips were moving,
+but no sound came from them. He looked at me."</p>
+
+<p>He tried to comfort her.</p>
+
+<p>"Come now, my darling, how can you suppose that a priest, a priest in
+his surplice, would show himself in a restaurant?"</p>
+
+<p>She listened obediently, and allowed herself to be persuaded.</p>
+
+<p>"You are right, you are right, I know it well enough."</p>
+
+<p>In that little head of hers illusions were soon dispelled. She was born
+two hundred and thirty years after the death of Descartes, of whom she
+had never heard; yet, as Dr. Socrates would have said, he had taught her
+the use of reason.</p>
+
+<p>Robert met her at six o'clock after the rehearsal, under the arcades of
+the Od&eacute;on, and drove away with her in a cab.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are we going?" she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated a little.</p>
+
+<p>"You would not care to go back to our house out there?"</p>
+
+<p>She cried out at the suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no! I couldn't! Oh, heavens, never!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page175" id="page175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He replied that he had thought as much; that he would try to find
+something else: a little ground-floor flat in Paris; that in the
+meantime, just for to-day, they would content themselves with a chance
+abode.</p>
+
+<p>She gazed at him with fixed, heavy eyes, drew him violently towards her,
+scorching his neck and ear with the breath of her desire. Then her arms
+fell away from him, and she sank back beside him, dejected and relaxed.</p>
+
+<p>When the cab stopped, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"You will not be vexed with me, will you, my own Robert, at what I am
+going to say? Not to-day&mdash;to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>She had considered it necessary to make this sacrifice to the jealous
+dead.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page176" id="page176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/o.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="46" title="O" alt="O" />n the following day, he took her to a furnished room, commonplace but
+cheerful, which he had selected on the first floor of a house facing the
+square, near the Biblioth&egrave;que Nationale. In the centre of the square
+stood the basin of a fountain, supported by lusty nymphs. The paths,
+bordered with laurel and spindlewood, were deserted, and from this
+little-frequented spot one heard the vast and reassuring hum of the
+city. The rehearsal had finished very late. When they entered the room
+the night, already slower to arrive in this season of melting snow, was
+beginning to cast its gloom over the hangings. The large mirrors of the
+wardrobe and overmantel were filling with vague lights and shadows. She
+took off her fur coat, went to look out of the window between the
+curtains and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, the steps are wet."</p>
+
+<p>He answered that there was no flight of steps, only the pavement and the
+road, and then another pavement and the railings of the square.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page177" id="page177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You are a Parisian, you know this square well. In the centre, among the
+trees, there is a monumental fountain, with enormous women whose breasts
+are not as pretty as yours."</p>
+
+<p>In his impatience he helped her to undo her cloth frock; but he could
+not find the hooks, and scratched himself with the pins.</p>
+
+<p>"I am clumsy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She retorted laughingly:</p>
+
+<p>"You are certainly not so clever as Madame Michon! It's not so much
+clumsiness, but you are afraid of getting pricked. Men are a cowardly
+race. As for women, they have to accustom themselves to suffer. It's
+true: to be a woman is to be nearly always ailing."</p>
+
+<p>He did not notice that she was pale, with dark rings round her eyes. He
+desired her so ardently; he no longer saw her.</p>
+
+<p>"They are very sensitive to pain," he said, "but they are also very
+sensitive to pleasure. Do you know Claude Bernard?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"He was a great scientist. He said that he didn't hesitate to recognize
+woman's supremacy in the domain of physical and moral sensibility."</p>
+
+<p>Nantueil; unhooking her stays, replied:</p>
+
+<p>"If he meant by that that all women are sensitive, he was indeed an old
+greenhorn. He ought
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page178" id="page178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+
+to have seen Fagette; he would soon have discovered
+whether it was easy to get anything out of her in the domain&mdash;how did he
+express it?&mdash;of physical and moral sensibility."</p>
+
+<p>And she added with gentle pride:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you make any mistake, Robert, there's not such a heap of women
+like myself."</p>
+
+<p>As he was drawing her into his arms, she released herself.</p>
+
+<p>"You are hindering me."</p>
+
+<p>Sitting down and doubling herself up in order to undo her boots, she
+continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, Dr. Socrates told me the other day that he had seen an
+apparition. He saw a donkey-boy who had murdered a little girl. I dreamt
+of the story last night, only in my dream I could not make out whether
+the donkey-boy was a man or a woman. What a mix-up the dream was!
+Talking of Dr. Socrates, just guess whose lover he is&mdash;why, the lady who
+keeps the circulating library in the Rue Mazarine. She is no longer very
+young, but she is very intelligent. Do you think he is faithful to her?
+I'll take off my stockings, it's more becoming."</p>
+
+<p>And she went on to tell him a story of the theatre:</p>
+
+<p>"I really don't think I shall remain at the Od&eacute;on much longer."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page179" id="page179">[Pg 179]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"You'll see. Pradel said to me to-day, before rehearsal 'My dear little
+Nanteuil, there has never been anything between us. It is ridiculous.'
+He was extremely decorous, but he gave me to understand that we were in
+a false position with regard to one another, which could not go on
+indefinitely. You must know that Pradel has established a rule. Formerly
+he used to pick and choose among his <i>pensionnaires</i>. He had favourites,
+and that caused an outcry. Nowadays, for the better administration of
+the theatre, he takes them all, even those he has no liking for, even
+those who are distasteful to him. There are no more favourites.
+Everything goes splendidly. Ah, he's a director all through, is Pradel!"</p>
+
+<p>As Robert, in the bed, listened in silence, she went up to him and shook
+him:</p>
+
+<p>"Then it's all the same to you if I carry on with Pradel?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my dear, it would not be all the same to me. But nothing I might
+say would prevent it."</p>
+
+<p>Bending over him, she caressed him ardently, pretending to threaten and
+to punish him; and she cried:</p>
+
+<p>"Then you don't really love me, that you are not jealous. I insist that
+you shall be jealous."</p>
+
+<p>Then, suddenly, she moved away from him, and
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page180" id="page180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+
+hitching over her left
+shoulder her chemise, which had slipped down under her right breast, she
+loitered in front of the dressing-table and inquired uneasily:</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, you have not brought anything here from the other room?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing."</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon, softly, timidly, she slipped into the bed. But hardly had she
+lain down when she raised herself from the pillow on her elbow, and,
+craning her neck, listened with parted lips. It seemed to her that she
+could hear slight sounds of footsteps along the gravel path which she
+had heard in the house in the Boulevard de Villiers. She ran to the
+window; she saw the Judas tree, the lawn, the garden gate. Knowing what
+she was yet to see, she sought to hide her face in her hands, but she
+could not raise her arms, and Chevalier's face rose up before her.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page181" id="page181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/s.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="S" alt="S" />he had returned home in a burning fever. Robert, after dining <i>en
+famille</i>, had retired to his attic. His nerves were on edge, and he was
+badly out of temper as a result of the manner in which Nanteuil had left
+him.</p>
+
+<p>His shirt and his clothes, laid out on the bed by his valet, seemed to
+be waiting for him in a domestic and obsequious attitude. He began to
+dress himself with a somewhat ill-tempered alacrity. He was impatient to
+leave the house. He opened his round window, listened to the murmur of
+the city, and saw above the roofs the glow which rose into the sky from
+the city of Paris. He scented from afar all the amorous flesh gathered,
+on this winter's night, in the theatres and the great <i>cabarets</i>, the
+caf&eacute;-concerts and the bars.</p>
+
+<p>Irritated by F&eacute;licie's denial of his desires, he had decided to satisfy
+them elsewhere, and as he was not conscious of any preference he
+believed that his only difficulty would be to make a choice; but he
+presently realized that he had no desire for any
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page182" id="page182">[Pg 182]</a></span>
+
+of the women of his
+acquaintance, nor did he even feel any desire for an unknown woman. He
+closed his window, and seated himself before the fire.</p>
+
+<p>It was a coke fire; Madame de Ligny, who wore cloaks costing a thousand
+pounds, was wont to economize in the matter of her table and her fires.
+She would not allow wood to be burned in her house.</p>
+
+<p>He reflected upon his own affairs, to which he had so far given little
+or no thought; upon the career he had embraced, and which he beheld
+obscurely before him. The Minister was a great friend of his family. A
+mountaineer of the C&eacute;vennes, brought up on chestnuts, his dazzled eyes
+blinked at the flower-bedecked tables of Paris. He was too shrewd and
+too wily not to retain his advantage over the old aristocracy, which
+welcomed him to its bosom: the advantage of harsh caprices and arrogant
+refusals. Ligny knew him, and expected no favours at his hands. In this
+respect he was more perspicacious than his mother, who credited herself
+with a certain power over the dark, hairy little man, whom every
+Thursday she engulfed in her majestic skirts on the way from the
+drawing-room to the dinner-table. He judged him to be disobliging. And
+then something had gone wrong between them. Robert, as ill luck would
+have it, had forestalled his Minister in his intimacy with a
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page183" id="page183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+
+lady whom
+the latter loved to the verge of absurdity: Madame de Neuilles, a woman
+of easy virtue. And it seemed to him that the hairy little man suspected
+it, and regarded him with an unfriendly eye. And, lastly, the idea had
+grown upon him at the Quai d'Orsay that Ministers are neither able nor
+willing to do very much. But he did not exaggerate matters, and thought
+it quite possible that he might obtain a minor secretaryship. Such had
+been his wish hitherto. He was most anxious not to leave Paris. His
+mother, on the contrary, would have preferred that he should be sent to
+The Hague, where a post as third secretary was vacant. Now, of a sudden,
+he decided in favour of The Hague. "I'll go," he said. "The sooner the
+better." Having made up his mind, he reviewed his reasons. In the first
+place, it would be an excellent thing for his future career. Again, The
+Hague post was a pleasant one. A friend of his, who had held it, had
+enlarged upon the delightful hypocrisy of the sleepy little capital,
+where everything was engineered and "wangled" for the comfort of the
+Diplomatic Corps. He reflected, also, that The Hague was the august
+cradle of a new international law, and finally went so far as to invoke
+the argument that he would be giving pleasure to his mother. After which
+he realized that he wanted to leave home solely on account of F&eacute;licie.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page184" id="page184">[Pg 184]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>His thoughts of her were not benevolent. He knew her to be mendacious,
+timorous, and a malicious friend. He had proof that she was given to
+falling in love with actors of the lowest type, or, at all events, that
+she made shift with them. He was not certain that she did not deceive
+him, not that he had discovered anything suspect in the life which she
+was leading, but because he was properly distrustful of all women. He
+conjured up in his mind all the evil that he knew of her, and persuaded
+himself that she was a little jade, and, being conscious that he loved
+her, he believed that he loved her merely because of her extreme
+prettiness. This reason seemed to him a sound one; but on analysing it
+he perceived that it explained nothing; that he loved the girl not
+because she was exceedingly pretty, but because she was pretty in a
+certain uncommon fashion of her own; that he loved her for that which
+was incomparable and rare in her; because, in a word, she was a
+wonderful thing of art and voluptuousness, a living gem of priceless
+value. Thereupon, realizing how weak he was, he wept, mourning over his
+lost freedom, his captive mind, his disordered soul, the devotion of his
+very flesh and blood to a weak, perfidious little creature.</p>
+
+<p>He had scorched his eyes by gazing at the coke fire behind the bars of
+the grate. He closed them in pain and, under his closed eyes, he saw
+negroes
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page185" id="page185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+
+leaping before him in an obscene and bloody riot. While he
+sought to remember from what book of travel, read in boyhood, these
+blacks emerged, he saw them diminish, resolve themselves into
+imperceptible specks, and disappear into a red Africa, which little by
+little came to represent the wound seen by the light of a match on the
+night of the suicide. He reflected.</p>
+
+<p>"That fool of a Chevalier! Why, I was scarcely thinking of the fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, against this background of blood and flame; appeared the
+slender form of F&eacute;licie, and he felt lurking within him a hot, cruel
+desire.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page186" id="page186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/h.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="46" title="H" alt="H" />e went to see her the following day, in the little flat in the
+Boulevard Saint-Michel. He was not in the habit of going thither. He did
+not particularly care to meet Madame Nanteuil; she bored him and
+embarrassed him, although she was extremely polite to him, even to
+obsequiousness.</p>
+
+<p>It was she who received him in the little drawing-room. She thanked him
+for his interest in F&eacute;licie's health, and informed him that she had been
+restless and unwell the night before, but was now feeling better.</p>
+
+<p>"She is in her bedroom, working at her part. I will tell her that you
+are here. She will be very glad to see you, Monsieur de Ligny. She knows
+that you are very fond of her. And true friends are rare, especially in
+the theatrical world."</p>
+
+<p>Robert observed Madame Nanteuil with an attention which he had not
+hitherto bestowed upon her. He was trying to see in her face the face
+that would be her daughter's in years to come. When
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page187" id="page187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+
+walking in the
+street he was fond of reading, in the faces of the mothers, the
+love-affairs of the daughters. And on this occasion he assiduously
+deciphered the features and the figure of this woman as an interesting
+prophecy. He discovered nothing either of bad or good augury. Madame
+Nanteuil, plump, fresh-complexioned, cool-skinned, was not unattractive
+with the sensuous fullness of her contours. But her daughter did not in
+the least resemble her.</p>
+
+<p>Seeing her so collected and serene, he said to her:</p>
+
+<p>"You yourself are not of a nervous temperament?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have never been nervous. My daughter does not take after me. She is
+the living image of her father. He was delicate, although his health was
+not bad. He died of a fall from his horse. You'll take a cup of tea,
+won't you, Monsieur de Ligny?"</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie entered the room. Her hair was outspread upon her shoulders; she
+was wrapped in a white woollen dressing-gown, held very loosely at the
+waist by a heavy embroidered girdle, and she shuffled along in red
+slippers; she looked a mere child. The friend of the house, Tony Meyer,
+the picture dealer, was wont when he saw her in this garment, which was
+a trifle monkish in appearance,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page188" id="page188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+
+to call her Brother Ange de Charolais,
+because he had discovered in her a resemblance to a portrait by Nattier
+which represented Mademoiselle de Charolais in the Franciscan habit.
+Before this little girl, Robert was surprised and silent.</p>
+
+<p>"It's kind of you," she said, "to have come to inquire after me. I am
+better, thank you."</p>
+
+<p>"She works very hard; she works too hard," said Madame Nanteuil. "Her
+part in <i>La Grille</i> is tiring her."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, mother."</p>
+
+<p>They spoke of the theatre, and the conversation languished.</p>
+
+<p>During a moment's silence, Madame Nanteuil asked Monsieur de Ligny if he
+were still collecting old fashion-prints.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie and Robert looked at her without understanding. They had told
+her not long before some fiction about engraved fashion-plates, to
+explain the meetings which they had not been able to conceal. But they
+had quite forgotten the fact. Since then, a piece of the moon, as an old
+author has said, had fallen into their love; Madame Nanteuil alone, in
+her profound respect for fiction, remembered it.</p>
+
+<p>"My daughter told me you had a great number of those old engravings and
+that she used to find ideas for her costumes in them."</p>
+
+<p>"Quite so, madame, quite so."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page189" id="page189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Come here, Monsieur de Ligny," said F&eacute;licie. "I want to show you a
+design for a costume for the part of C&eacute;cile de Rochemaure."</p>
+
+<p>And she carried him off to her room.</p>
+
+<p>It was a small room hung with flowered paper; the furniture consisted of
+a wardrobe with a mirror, a couple of chairs upholstered in horsehairs
+and an iron bedstead; with a white counterpane; above it was a bowl for
+holy water, and a sprig of boxwood.</p>
+
+<p>She gave him a long kiss on the mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"I do love you, do you know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes! And you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I too, I love you. I wouldn't have believed that I could love you so!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then it came afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>"It always comes afterwards."</p>
+
+<p>"That's true, what you've just said, Robert. Before&mdash;one doesn't know."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I was very ill yesterday."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you seen Trublet? What did he say?"</p>
+
+<p>"He told me that I needed rest, and quiet. My darling, we must be
+sensible for another fortnight. Do you mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do."</p>
+
+<p>"So do I. But what would you have?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page190" id="page190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He strolled round the room two or three times, looking into every
+corner. She watched him with some little uneasiness, dreading lest he
+should ask her questions about her poor jewels and her cheap trinkets,
+which were modest enough as presents, but she could not in every case
+explain how she came to receive them. One may say anything one pleases,
+of course, but one may contradict oneself, and get into trouble, and
+that assuredly is not worth while. She diverted his attention.</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, open my glove-box."</p>
+
+<p>"What have you got in your glove-box?"</p>
+
+<p>"The violets you gave me the first time. Darling, don't leave me! Don't
+go away. When I think that from one day to the next you may go to some
+foreign country, to London, to Constantinople, I feel crazy."</p>
+
+<p>He comforted her, telling her that there had been some thought of
+sending him to The Hague. But he was determined not to go; he would get
+himself attached to the Minister's staff.</p>
+
+<p>"You promise?"</p>
+
+<p>He gave the promise in all sincerity. And she became quite cheerful.</p>
+
+<p>Pointing to the little wardrobe with its looking-glass, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Look, darling, it's there that I study my part. When you came, I was
+working over my scene in
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page191" id="page191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+
+the fourth. I take advantage of being alone to
+try for the exact tone. I seek a broad, mellow effect. If I were to
+listen to Romilly I should mince my words, and the result would be
+wretched. I have to say. 'I do not fear you.' It's the great moment of
+the part. Do you know how Romilly would have me say: 'I do not fear
+you'? I'll show you, I am to raise my hand to my nose, open my fingers
+and speak one word to each finger separately, in a particular tone, with
+a special expression 'I, do, not, fear, you,' as if I were exhibiting
+marionettes! It's a wonder he does not ask me to put a little paper hat
+on every finger. Subtle, intellectual, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>Then, lifting her hair and uncovering her animated features, she said:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll show you how I do it."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly transfigured, seeming of greater stature, she spoke the words
+with an air of ingenuous dignity and serene innocence:</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir, I do not fear you. Why should I fear you? You thought to
+ensnare me, and you have placed yourself at my mercy. You are a man of
+honour. Now that I am under the shelter of your roof, you shall tell me
+what you told Chevalier d'Amberre, your enemy, when he entered that
+gate. You shall tell me: 'You are in your own house; I am yours to
+command.'"</p>
+
+<p>She had the mysterious gift of changing her
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page192" id="page192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+
+soul and her very face.
+Ligny was under the spell of this beautiful illusion.</p>
+
+<p>"You are marvellous!"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, pussy-cat. I shall wear a big lawn bonnet with lappets, one
+above the other, on either side of my face. You see, in the play I am a
+young girl of the Revolution. And it is imperative that I should make
+people feel it. I must have the Revolution <i>in</i> me, do you understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you well up in the Revolution?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I am! I don't know the dates, to be sure. But I have the
+feeling of the period. For me, the Revolution means a bosom swelling
+with pride under a crossed neckerchief, knees enjoying full freedom in a
+striped petticoat, and a tiny blaze of colour on the cheek-bones. There
+you have it!"</p>
+
+<p>He asked her questions about the play, and he realized that she knew
+nothing about it. She, did not need to know anything about it. She
+divined, she found by instinct all that she needed from it.</p>
+
+<p>"At rehearsals, I never give them a hint as to any of my effects, I keep
+them all for the public. It will make Romilly tear his hair. How stupid
+they'll all look! Fagette, my dear, will make herself ill over it."</p>
+
+<p>She sat down on a little rickety chair. Her forehead, but a moment
+before as white as marble,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page193" id="page193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+
+was rosy; she had once more assumed her
+cheeky flapper's expression.</p>
+
+<p>He drew near to her, gazed into the fascinating grey of her eyes, and,
+as on the evening before, when he sat in front of his coke-fire, he
+reflected that she was untruthful and cowardly, and ill-natured toward
+her friends; but now the thought was tempered with indulgence. He
+reflected that she had love-affairs with actors of the lowest type, or
+that she at least made shift with them; but the thought was tempered
+with a gentle pity. He recalled all the evil that he knew of her, but
+without bitterness. He felt that he loved her, less because she was
+pretty than because she was pretty in her own fashion; in a word, that
+he loved her because she was a gem endowed with life, and an
+incomparable thing of art and voluptuousness. He looked into the
+fascinating grey of her eyes, into their pupils, where tiny astrological
+symbols seemed to float in a luminous tide. He gazed at her with a gaze
+so searching that she felt it pierce right through her. And, assured
+that he had seen right into her, she said to him, with her eyes on his,
+clasping his head between her two hands:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes! I'm a rotten little actress; but I love you, and I don't care a
+rap for money. And there aren't many as good as me. And you know it well
+enough."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page194" id="page194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/t2.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="T" alt="T" />hey met daily at the theatre, and they went for walks together.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil was playing almost every night, and was eagerly working at her
+part of C&eacute;cile. She was gradually recovering her peace of mind; her
+nights were less disturbed; she no longer made her mother hold her hand
+while she fell asleep and no longer found herself suffocating in
+nightmares. A fortnight went by in this fashion. Then, one morning,
+while sitting at her dressing-table, combing her hairs she bent her head
+toward the glass, as the weather was overcast, and she saw in it, not
+her own face, but the face of the dead man. A thread of blood was
+trickling from one corner of his mouth; he was smiling and gazing at
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Thereupon she decided to do what she thought would be the proper and
+efficacious thing. She took a cab and drove off to see him. Going down
+the Boulevard Saint-Michel she bought a bunch of roses at her florist's.
+She took them to him. She went down on her knees before the tiny
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page195" id="page195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+
+black
+cross which marked the spot where they had laid him. She spoke to him,
+she begged him to be reasonable, to leave her in peace. She asked his
+forgiveness for having treated him formerly with harshness. People did
+not always understand one another in life. But now he ought to
+understand and forgive her. What good did it do to him to torment her?
+She asked no better than to retain a kindly memory of him. She would
+come and see him from time to time. But he must cease to persecute and
+frighten her.</p>
+
+<p>She sought to flatter and soothe him with gentle phrases.</p>
+
+<p>"I can understand that you wanted to revenge yourself. It was natural.
+But you are not wicked at heart. Don't be angry any more. Don't frighten
+me any more. Don't come to see me any more. I'll come to you; I'll come
+often. I'll bring you flowers."</p>
+
+<p>She longed to deceive him, to soothe him with lying promises, to say to
+him "Stay where you are; do not be restless any longer; stay where you
+are, and I swear to you that I will never again do anything to offend
+you; I promise to submit to your will." But she dared not lie over a
+grave, and she was sure that it would be useless, that the dead know
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>A little wearied, she continued awhile, more
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page196" id="page196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+
+indolently, her prayers
+and supplications, and she realized that she no longer felt the horror
+with which the tombs had formerly inspired her; that she had no fear of
+the dead man. She sought the reason for this, and discovered that he did
+not frighten her because he was not there.</p>
+
+<p>And she mused:</p>
+
+<p>"He is not there; he is never there; he is everywhere except where they
+laid him. He is in the streets, in the houses, in the rooms."</p>
+
+<p>And she rose to her feet in despair, feeling sure that henceforth she
+would meet him everywhere except in the cemetery.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page197" id="page197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/a.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="46" title="A" alt="A" />fter a fortnight's patience Ligny urged her to resume their former
+intercourse. The period which she herself had fixed had elapsed. He
+would not wait any longer. She suffered as much as he did in refusing
+herself to him. But she dreaded to see the dead man return. She found
+lame excuses for postponing appointments; at last she confessed that she
+was afraid. He despised her for displaying so little common sense and
+courage. He no longer felt that she loved him, and he spoke harshly to
+her, but he pursued her incessantly with his desire.</p>
+
+<p>Bitter days and barren hours followed. As she no longer dared to seek
+the shelter of a roof in his company, they used to take a cab, and after
+driving for hours about the outskirts of the city they would alight in
+some gloomy avenue, wandering far down it under the bitter east wind,
+walking swiftly, as though chastised by the breath of an unseen wrath.</p>
+
+<p>Once, however, the weather was so mild that it filled them with its soft
+languor. Side by side they
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page198" id="page198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+
+trod the deserted paths of the Bois de
+Boulogne. The buds, which were beginning to swell on the tips of the
+slender black branches, dyed the tree-tops violet under the rosy sky. To
+their left stretched the fields, dotted with clumps of leafless trees,
+and the houses of Auteuil were visible. Slowly driven coup&eacute;s, with their
+elderly passengers, crawled along the road, and the wet-nurses pushed
+their perambulators. A motor-car broke the silence of the Bois with its
+humming.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you like those machines?" asked F&eacute;licie.</p>
+
+<p>"I find them convenient, that's all."</p>
+
+<p>It was true that he was no chauffeur. He had no taste for any kind of
+sport; he concerned himself only with women.</p>
+
+<p>Pointing to a cab which had just passed them, she exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, did you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Jeanne Perrin was in it with a woman."</p>
+
+<p>And, as he displayed a calm indifference, she added in a reproachful
+tone:</p>
+
+<p>"You are like Dr. Socrates. Do you think that sort of thing natural?"</p>
+
+<p>The lake slept, bright and serene, within its sombre walls of pines.
+They took the path to their right, which skirted the bank where the
+white geese and swans were preening their feathers. At their
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page199" id="page199">[Pg 199]</a></span>
+
+approach a
+flotilla of ducks, like living hulls, their necks curving like prows,
+set sail toward them.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie told them, in a regretful tone, that she had nothing to give
+them.</p>
+
+<p>"When I was little," she went on to say, "Papa used to take me out on
+Sundays to feed the animals. It was my reward for having learned my
+lessons well all the week. Papa used to delight in the country. He was
+fond of dog, horses, all animals in fact. He was very gentle and very
+clever. He used to work very hard. But life is difficult for an officer
+who has no money of his own. It grieved him sorely not to be able to do
+as the wealthy officers did, and then he didn't hit it off with Mamma.
+Papa's life was not a happy one. He was often wretched. He didn't talk
+much; but we two understood one another without speaking. He was very
+fond of me. Robert, dearest, later on, in the distant future, the very
+distant future, I shall have a tiny house in the country. And when you
+come there, my beloved, you will find me in a short skirt, throwing corn
+to my fowls."</p>
+
+<p>He asked her what gave her the idea of going on the stage.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew very well that I'd never find a husband, since I had no dowry.
+And from what I saw of my older girl friends, working at dress-making or
+in a telegraph office, I was not encouraged to follow in
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page200" id="page200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+
+their steps.
+When I was quite a little girl I thought it would be nice to be an
+actress. I had once acted, at my boarding-school, in a little play, on
+St. Nicholas' Day. I thought it no end of a lark. The schoolmistress
+said I didn't act well, but that was because Mamma owed her for a whole
+term. From the time I was fifteen I began to think seriously about going
+on the stage. I entered the Conservatoire, I worked, I worked very hard.
+It's a back-breaking trade. But success brings rest."</p>
+
+<p>Opposite the chalet on the island they found the ferry-boat moored to
+the landing. Ligny jumped into it, pulling F&eacute;licie after him.</p>
+
+<p>"Those tall trees are lovely, even without leaves," she said. "But I
+thought the chalet was closed at this time of the year."</p>
+
+<p>The ferryman told them that, on fine winter days, people out for a walk
+liked to visit the island, because they could enjoy quiet there, and
+that he had only just ferried a couple of ladies across.</p>
+
+<p>A waiter, who was living amid the solitude of the island, brought them
+tea, in a rustic sitting-room, furnished with a couple of chairs, a
+table, a piano, and a sofa. The panelling was mildewed, the planks of
+the flooring had started. F&eacute;licie looked out of the window at the lawn
+and the tall trees.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page201" id="page201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What is that," she asked, "that big dark ball on the poplar?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's mistletoe, my pet."</p>
+
+<p>"One would think it was an animal rolled round the branch, gnawing at
+it. It isn't nice to look at."</p>
+
+<p>She rested her head on her lover's shoulder, saying in a languid tone:</p>
+
+<p>"I love you."</p>
+
+<p>He drew her down upon the sofa. She felt him, kneeling at her feet, his
+hands, clumsy with impatience, gliding over her, and she suffered his
+attempts, inert, discouraged, foreseeing that it was useless. Her ears
+were ringing like a little bell. The ringing ceased, and she heard; on
+her right, a strange, clear, glacial voice say. "I forbid you to belong
+to one another." It seemed to her that the voice spoke from above, in
+the glow of light, but she did not dare to turn her head. It was an
+unfamiliar voice. Involuntarily and despite herself she tried to
+remember his voice, and she realized that she had forgotten its sound,
+and that she could never again remember it. The thought came to her
+"Perhaps this is the voice he has now." Terrified, she swiftly pushed
+her skirt over her knees. But she refrained from crying out, and she did
+not speak of what she had just heard, lest she should be taken for a
+madwoman, and because she realized somehow that it was not real.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page202" id="page202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Ligny drew away from her.</p>
+
+<p>"If you don't want anything more to do with me, say so honestly. I am
+not going to take you by force."</p>
+
+<p>Sitting upright, with her knees pressed together, she told him:</p>
+
+<p>"Whenever we are in a crowd, as long as there are people about us, I
+want you, I long for you, but as soon as we are by ourselves I am
+afraid."</p>
+
+<p>He replied by a cheap, spiteful sneer:</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, if you must have a public to stimulate you!"</p>
+
+<p>She rose, and returned to the window. A tear was running down her cheek.
+She wept for some time in silence. Suddenly she called to him:</p>
+
+<p>"Look there!"</p>
+
+<p>She pointed to Jeanne Perrin, who was strolling on the lawn with a young
+woman. Each had an arm about the other's waist; they were giving one
+another violets to smell, and were smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"See! That woman is happy; her mind at peace."</p>
+
+<p>And Jeanne Perrin, tasting the peace of long-established habits,
+strolled along satisfied and serene, without even betraying any pride in
+her strange preference.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie watched her with, an interest which she did not confess to
+herself, and envied her her serenity.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page203" id="page203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"She's not afraid, that woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Let her be! What harm is she doing us?"</p>
+
+<p>And he caught her violently by the waist. She freed herself with a
+shudder. In the end, disappointed, frustrated, humiliated, he lost his
+temper, called her a silly fool, and swore that he would not stand her
+ridiculous way of treating him any longer.</p>
+
+<p>She made no reply, and once more she began to weep.</p>
+
+<p>Angered by her tears, he told her harshly:</p>
+
+<p>"Since you can no longer give me what I ask you, it is useless for us to
+meet any more. There is nothing more to be said between us. Besides, I
+see that you have ceased to love me. And you would admit, if for once
+you could speak the truth, that you have never loved anyone except that
+wretched second-rate actor."</p>
+
+<p>Then her anger exploded, and she moaned in despair:</p>
+
+<p>"Liar! Liar! That's an abominable thing to say. You see I'm crying, and
+you want to make me suffer more. You take advantage of the fact that I
+love you to make me miserable. It's cowardly. Well, no then, I don't
+love you any longer. Go away! I don't want to see you again. Go! But
+it's true&mdash;what are we doing like this? Are we going to spend our lives
+staring at each other
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page204" id="page204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
+
+like this, wild with each other, full of despair
+and rage? It is not my fault&mdash;I can't, I can't. Forgive me, darling, I
+love you, I worship you, I want you. Only drive him away. You are a man,
+you know what there is to do. Drive him away. You killed him, not I. It
+was you. Kill him altogether then&mdash;Oh God, I am going mad. I am going
+mad!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>On the following day, Ligny applied to be sent as Third Secretary to The
+Hague. He was appointed a week later, and left at once, without having
+seen F&eacute;licie again.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page205" id="page205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/m.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="M" alt="M" />adam Nanteuil thought of nothing but her daughter's welfare. Her
+liaison with Tony Meyers the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy, left
+her with plenty of leisure and an unoccupied heart. She met at the
+theatre a Monsieur Bondois, a manufacturer of electrical apparatus; he
+was still young, superior to his trade, and extremely well-mannered. He
+was blessed with an amorous temperament and a bashful nature, and, as
+young and beautiful women frightened him, he had accustomed himself to
+desiring only women who were not young and beautiful. Madame Nanteuil
+was still a very pleasing woman. But one night when she was badly
+dressed, and did not look her best; he made her the offer of his
+affections. She accepted him as something of a help toward housekeeping,
+and so that her daughter should want for nothing. Her devotion brought
+her happiness. Monsieur Bondois loved her, and courted her most
+ardently. At the outset this surprised her; then it brought her
+happiness and peace of mind; it
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page206" id="page206">[Pg 206]</a></span>
+
+seemed to her natural and good to be
+loved, and she could not believe that her time for love was past when
+she was in receipt of proof to the contrary.</p>
+
+<p>She had always displayed a kindly disposition, an easy-going character,
+and an even temper. But never yet had she revealed in her home so happy
+a spirit and such gracious thoughtfulness. Kind to others, and to
+herself, always preserving, in the lapse of changeful hours, the smile
+that disclosed her beautiful teeth and brought the dimples into her
+plump cheeks, grateful to life for what it was giving her, blooming,
+expanding, overflowing, she was the joy and the youth of the house.</p>
+
+<p>While Madame Nanteuil conceived and gave expression to bright and
+cheerful ideas, F&eacute;licie was fast becoming gloomy, fretful, and sullen.
+Lines began to show in her pretty face; her voice assumed a grating
+quality. She had at once realized the position which Monsieur Bondois
+occupied in the household, and, whether she would have preferred her
+mother to live and breathe for her alone, whether her filial piety
+suffered because she was forced to respect her less, whether she envied
+her happiness, or whether she merely felt the distress which love
+affairs cause us when we are brought into too close contact with them,
+F&eacute;licie, more especially at meal-times, and every day, bitterly
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page207" id="page207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+
+reproached Madame Nanteuil, in very pointed allusions, and in terms
+which were not precisely veiled, in respect of this new "friend of the
+family"; and for Monsieur Bondois himself, whenever she met him, she
+exhibited an expressive disgust and an unconcealed aversion. Madame
+Nanteuil was only moderately distressed by this, and she excused her
+daughter by reflecting that the young girl had as yet no experience of
+life. And Monsieur Bondois, whom F&eacute;licie inspired with a superhuman
+terror, strove to placate her by signs of respect and inconsiderable
+presents.</p>
+
+<p>She was violent because she was suffering. The letters which she
+received from The Hague inflamed her love, so that it was a pain to her.
+A prey to consuming visions, she was pining away. When she saw her
+absent friend too clearly her temples throbbed, her heart beat
+violently, and a dense increasing shadow would darken her mind. All the
+sensibility of her nerves, all the warmth of her blood, all the forces
+of her being flowed through her, sinking downwards, merging themselves
+in desire in the very depths of her flesh. At such times she had no
+other thought than to recover Ligny. It was Ligny that she wanted, only
+Ligny, and she herself was surprised at the disgust which she felt for
+all other men. For her instincts had not always been so exclusive. She
+told herself that
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page208" id="page208">[Pg 208]</a></span>
+
+she would go at once to Bondois, ask him for money,
+and take the train for The Hague. And she did not do it. What deterred
+her was not so much the idea of displeasing her lover, who would have
+looked upon such a journey as bad form, as the vague fear of awakening
+the slumbering shadow.</p>
+
+<p>That she had not seen since Ligny's departure. But perturbing things
+were happening, within her and around her. In the street she was
+followed by a water-spaniel, which appealed and vanished suddenly. One
+morning when she was in bed her mother told her "I am going to the
+dressmaker's," and went out. Two or three minutes later F&eacute;licie saw her
+come back into the room as if she had forgotten something. But the
+apparition advanced without a look at her, without a word, without a
+sounds and disappeared as it touched the bed.</p>
+
+<p>She had even more disturbing illusions. One Sunday, she was acting, in a
+matin&eacute;e of <i>Athalie</i>, the part of young Zacharias. As she had very
+pretty legs she found the disguise not displeasing; she was glad also to
+show that she knew how verse should be spoken. But she noticed that in
+the orchestra stalls there was a priest wearing his cassock. It was not
+the first time that an ecclesiastic had been present at an afternoon
+performance
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page209" id="page209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+
+of this tragedy drawn from the Scriptures. Nevertheless, it
+impressed her disagreeably. When she went on the stage she distinctly
+saw Louise Dalle, wearing the turban of Jehoshabeath; loading a revolver
+in front of the prompter's box. She had enough common sense and presence
+of mind to reject this absurd vision, which disappeared. But she spoke
+her first lines in an inaudible voice.</p>
+
+<p>She had burning pains in the stomach. She suffered from fits of
+suffocation, sometimes, without apparent cause, an unspeakable agony
+gripped her bowels, her heart beat madly and she feared that she must be
+dying.</p>
+
+<p>Dr Trublet attended her with watchful prudence. She often saw him at the
+theatre, and occasionally went to consult him at his old house in the
+Rue de Seine. She did not go through the waiting-room; the servant would
+show her at once into the little dining-room, where Arab potteries
+glinted in the shadows, and she was always the first to be shown in. One
+day Socrates succeeded in making her understand the manner in which
+images are formed in the brain, and how these images do not always
+correspond with external objects, or, at my rate, do not always
+correspond exactly.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallucinations," he added, "are more often than not merely false
+perceptions. One sees a thing, but one sees it badly, so that a
+feather-broom
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page210" id="page210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+
+becomes a head of bristling locks, a red carnation is a
+beast's open mouth, and a chemise is a ghost in its winding-sheet.
+Insignificant errors."</p>
+
+<p>From these arguments she derived sufficient strength to despise and
+dispel her visions of cats and dogs, or of persons who were living, and
+well known to her. Yet she dreaded seeing the dead man again; and the
+mystic terrors nestling in the obscure crannies of her brain were more
+powerful than the demonstrations of science. It was useless to tell her
+that the dead never returned; she knew very well that they did.</p>
+
+<p>On this occasion Socrates once more advised her to find some
+distraction, to visit her friends, and by preference the more pleasant
+of her friends, and to avoid darkness and solitude, as her two most
+treacherous enemies.</p>
+
+<p>And he added this prescription:</p>
+
+<p>"Especially must you avoid persons and things which may be connected
+with the object of your visions."</p>
+
+<p>He did not see that this was impossible. Nor did Nanteuil.</p>
+
+<p>"Then you will cure me, dear old Socrates," she said, turning upon him
+her pretty grey eyes, full of entreaty.</p>
+
+<p>"You will cure yourself my child. You will cure yourself, because you
+are hard-working,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page211" id="page211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+
+sensible, and courageous. Yes, yes, you are timid and
+brave at the same time. You dread danger, but you have the courage to
+live. You will be cured, because you are not in sympathy with evil and
+suffering. You will be cured because you want to be cured."</p>
+
+<p>"You think then that one can be cured if one wills it?"</p>
+
+<p>"When one wills it in a certain profound, intimate fashion, when it is
+our cells that will it within us, when it is our unconscious self that
+wills it; when one wills it with the secret, abounding, absolute will of
+the sturdy tree that wills itself to grow green again in the spring."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page212" id="page212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/t2.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="T" alt="T" />hat same night, being unable to sleep, she turned over in her bed, and
+threw back the bed-clothes. She felt that sleep was still far off, that
+it would come with the first rays, full of dancing atoms of dust, with
+which morning pierces the chinks between the curtains. The night-light,
+with its tiny burning heart shining through its porcelain shade, gave
+her a mystic and familiar companionship. F&eacute;licie opened her eyes and at
+a glance drank in the white milky glimmer which brought her peace of
+mind. Then, closing them once more, she relapsed into the tumultuous
+weariness of insomnia. Now and again a few words of her part recurred to
+her memory, words to which she attached no meaning, yet which obsessed
+her: "Our days are what we make them." And her mind wearied itself by
+turning over and over some four or five ideas.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go to Madame Royaumont to-morrow, to try on my gown. Yesterday I
+went with Fagette to Jeanne Perrin's dressing-room; she was dressing,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page213" id="page213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+
+and she showed her hairy legs, as if she was proud of them. She's not
+ugly, Jeanne Perrin; indeed, she has a fine head; but it is her
+expression that I dislike. How does Madame Colbert make out that I owe
+her thirty-two francs? Fourteen and three are seventeen, and nine,
+twenty-six. I owe her only twenty-six francs. 'Our days are what we make
+them.' How hot I feel!"</p>
+
+<p>With one swift movement of her supple loins she turned over, and her
+bare arms opened to embrace the air as though it had been a cool, subtle
+body.</p>
+
+<p>"It seems a hundred years since Robert went away. It was cruel of him to
+leave me alone. I am sick with longing for him." And curled up in her
+bed, she recollected intently the hours when they held each other in a
+close embrace. She called him:</p>
+
+<p>"My pussy-cat! Little wolf!"</p>
+
+<p>And immediately the same train of thoughts began once more their
+fatiguing procession through her mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Our days are what we make them. Our days are what we make them. Our
+days....' Fourteen and three, seventeen, and nine, twenty-six. I could
+see quite plainly that Jeanne Perrin showed her long man's legs, dark
+with hair, on purpose. Is it true what they say, that Jeanne Perrin
+gives money
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page214" id="page214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+
+to women? I must try my gown on at four o'clock to-morrow.
+There's one dreadful thing, Madame Royaumont never can put in the
+sleeves properly. How hot I am! Socrates is a good doctor. But he does
+sometimes amuse himself by making you feel a stupid fool."</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she thought of Chevalier, and she seemed to feel an influence
+emanating from him which was gliding along the walls of her bedroom. It
+seemed to her that the glimmer of the night-light was dimmed by it. It
+was less than a shadow, and it filled her with alarm. The idea suddenly
+flashed through her mind that this subtle thing had its origin in the
+portraits of the dead man. She had not kept any of them in her bedroom.
+But there were still some in the flat, some that she had not torn up.
+She carefully reckoned them up, and discovered that there must still be
+three left: the first, when he was quite young, showed him against a
+cloudy background; another, laughing and at his ease, sitting astride of
+a chair; a third as Don C&aelig;sar de Bazan. In her hurry to destroy every
+vestige of them she sprang out of bed, lit a candle, and in her
+nightgown shuffled along in her slippers into the drawing-room, until
+she came to the rosewood table, surmounted by a phoenix palm. She pulled
+up the tablecloth and searched through the drawer. It contained
+card-counters, sockets for candles, a
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page215" id="page215">[Pg 215]</a></span>
+
+few scraps of wood detached from
+the furniture, two or three lustres belonging to the chandelier and a
+few photographs, among which she found only one of Chevalier, the
+earliest, showing him standing against a cloudy background.</p>
+
+<p>She searched for the other two in a little piece of Boule furniture
+which adorned the space between the windows, and on which were some
+Chinese lamps. Here slumbered lamp-globes of ground glass, lamp-shades,
+cut-glass goblets ornamented with gilt bronze, a match-stand in painted
+porcelain flanked by a child sleeping against a drum beside a dog, books
+whose bindings were detached, tattered musical scores, a couple of
+broken fans, a flute, and a small heap of carte-de-visite portraits.
+There she discovered a second Chevalier, the Don C&aelig;sar de Bazan. The
+third was not there. She asked herself in vain where it could have been
+hidden away. Fruitlessly she hunted through boxes, bowls, flowerpot
+holders, and the music davenport. And while she was eagerly searching
+for the portrait, it was growing in size and distinctness in her
+imagination, attaining to a man's stature, was assuming a mocking air
+and defying her. Her head was on fire, her feet were like ice, and she
+could feel terror creeping into the pit of her stomach. Just as she was
+about to give up the search, about to go and bury her face in her
+pillow, she remembered that
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page216" id="page216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+
+her mother kept some photographs in her
+mirror-panelled wardrobe. She again took courage. Softly she entered the
+room of the sleeping Madame Nanteuil. With silent steps she crept over
+to the wardrobe, opened it slowly and noiselessly, and, standing on a
+chair, explored the top shelf, which was loaded with old cardboard
+boxes. She came upon an album which dated from the Second Empire, and
+which had not been opened for twenty years. She rummaged among a mass of
+letters, of bundles of receipts and Mont-de-Pi&eacute;t&eacute; vouchers. Awakened by
+the light of the candle and by the mouse-like noise made by the seeker,
+Madame Nanteuil demanded:</p>
+
+<p>"Who is there?"</p>
+
+<p>Immediately, perceiving the familiar little phantom in her long
+nightgown, with a heavy plait of hair down her back, perched on a chair,
+she exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"It's you, F&eacute;licie? You are not ill, are you? What are you doing there?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am looking for something."</p>
+
+<p>"In my wardrobe?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mamma."</p>
+
+<p>"Will you kindly go back to your bed! You will catch cold. Tell me at
+least what you are looking for. If it's the chocolate, it is on the
+middle shelf next to the silver sugar-basin."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page217" id="page217">[Pg 217]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But F&eacute;licie had seized upon a packet of photographs, which she was
+rapidly turning over. Her impatient fingers rejected Madame Doulce,
+bedecked with lace, Fagette, radiant, her hair dissolving in its own
+brilliance; Tony Meyer, with close-set eyes and a nose drooping over his
+lips; Pradel, with his flourishing beard; Trublet, bald and snub-nosed;
+Monsieur Bondois, with timorous eye and straight nose set above a heavy
+moustache. Although not in a mood to bestow any attention upon Monsieur
+Bondois, she gave him a passing glance of hostility, and by chance let a
+drop of candle-grease disfigure his nose.</p>
+
+<p>Madame Nanteuil, who was now wide awake, could make nothing of her
+proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>"F&eacute;licie, why on earth are you poking about in my wardrobe like that?"</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie, who at last held the photograph for which she had sought so
+assiduously, responded only by a cry of fierce delight and flew from the
+chair, taking with her her dead friend, and, inadvertently, Monsieur
+Bondois as well.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to the drawing-room she crouched down by the fireplace, and
+made a fire of paper, into which she cast Chevalier's three photographs.
+She watched them blazing, and when the three bits of cardboard, twisted
+and blackened, had flown up the chimney, and neither shape nor substance
+was
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page218" id="page218">[Pg 218]</a></span>
+
+left, she breathed freely. She really believed, this time, that she
+had deprived the jealous dead man of the material of his apparitions,
+and had freed herself from the dreaded obsession.</p>
+
+<p>On picking up her candlestick she saw Monsieur Bondois, whose nose had
+disappeared beneath a round blob of white wax. Not knowing what to do
+with him she threw him with a laugh into the still flaming grate.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to her room she stood before the looking-glass and drew her
+nightgown closely about her, in order to emphasize the lines of her
+body. A thought which occasionally flitted through her mind tarried
+there this time a little longer than usual.</p>
+
+<p>She was wont to ask herself:</p>
+
+<p>"Why is one made like that, with a head, arms, legs, hands, feet, chest,
+and abdomen? Why is one made like that and not otherwise? It's funny."</p>
+
+<p>And at the moment the human form seemed to her arbitrary, fantastic,
+alien. But her astonishment was soon over. And, as she looked at
+herself, she felt pleased with herself. She was conscious of a keen
+deep-seated delight in herself. She bared her breasts, held them
+delicately in the hollow of her hands, looked at them tenderly in the
+glass, as if they were not a part of herself, but something
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page219" id="page219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+
+belonging
+to her, like two living creatures, like a pair of doves.</p>
+
+<p>After smiling upon them, she went back to bed. Waking late in the
+morning she felt surprised for a moment at being alone in her bed.
+Sometimes, in a dream, she would divide herself into two beings, and,
+feeling her own flesh, she would dream that she was being caressed by a
+woman.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page220" id="page220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/t2.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="T" alt="T" />he dress rehearsal of <i>La Grille</i> was called for two o'clock. As early
+as one o'clock Dr. Trublet had taken his accustomed place in Nanteuil's
+dressing-room.</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;licie, who was being dressed by Madame Michon, reproached her doctor
+with having nothing to say to her. Yet it was she who, preoccupied, her
+mind concentrated upon the part which she was about to play, was not
+listening to him. She gave orders that nobody should be allowed to come
+into her dressing-room. For all that, she received Constantin Marc's
+visit with pleasure, for she found him sympathetic.</p>
+
+<p>He was getting excited. In order to conceal his agitation he made a
+pretence of talking about his woods in the Vivarais, and began to tell
+shooting stories and peasants' tales, which he did not finish.</p>
+
+<p>"I am in a funk," said Nanteuil. "And you, Monsieur Marc, don't you feel
+qualms in the stomach?"</p>
+
+<p>He denied feeling any anxiety. She insisted:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page221" id="page221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Now confess that you wish it were all over."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, since you insist, perhaps I would rather it were over."</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon Dr. Socrates, with a simple expression and in a quiet voice,
+asked him the following question:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you not believe that what must be accomplished has already been
+accomplished, and has been accomplished from all time?"</p>
+
+<p>And without waiting for a reply he added:</p>
+
+<p>"If the world's phenomena reach our consciousness in succession, we must
+not conclude from that that they are really successive, and we have
+still fewer reasons to believe that they are produced at the moment when
+we perceive them."</p>
+
+<p>"That's obvious," said Constantin Marc, who had not listened.</p>
+
+<p>"The universe," continued the doctor, "appears to us perpetually
+imperfect, and we are all under the illusion that it is perpetually
+completing itself. Since we perceive phenomena successively, we actually
+believe that they follow one another. We imagine that those which we no
+longer see are in the past, and those which we do not yet see are in the
+future. But it is possible to conceive beings built in such fashion that
+they perceive simultaneously what we regard as the past and the future.
+We may conceive beings who perceive phenomena in a retrograde
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page222" id="page222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+
+order, and see them unroll themselves from our future to our past. Animals
+disposing of space otherwise than ourselves, and able, for instance, to
+move at a speed greater than that of light, would conceive an idea of
+the succession of phenomena which would differ greatly from our own."</p>
+
+<p>"If only Durville is not going to rag me on the stage!" exclaimed
+F&eacute;licie, while Madame Michon was putting on her stockings under her
+skirt.</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc assured her that Durville did not even dream of any such
+thing, and begged her not to be uneasy.</p>
+
+<p>And Dr. Socrates resumed his discourse.</p>
+
+<p>"We ourselves, of a clear night, when we gaze at Spica Virginis, which
+is throbbing above the top of a poplar, can see at one and the same time
+that which was and that which is. And it may be said with equal truth
+that we see that which is and that which will be. For if the star, such
+as it appears to us, represents the past as compared with the tree, the
+tree constitutes the future as compared with the star. Yet the star,
+which, from afar, shows us its tiny, fiery countenance, not as it is
+to-day, but as it was in the time of our youth, perhaps even before our
+birth, and the poplar-tree, whose young leaves are trembling in the
+fresh night air, come together within us in the same moment of time, and
+to us are present simultaneously. We say of a thing that
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page223" id="page223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+
+it is in the
+present when we have a precise perception of it. We say that it is in
+the past when we preserve but an indistinct image of it. A thing may
+have been accomplished millions of years ago, yet if it makes the
+strongest possible impression upon us it will not be for us a thing of
+the past; it will be present. The order in which things revolve in the
+depths of the universe is unknown to us. We know only the order of our
+perceptions. To believe that the future does not exist, because we do
+not know it, is like believing that a book is not finished because we
+have not finished reading it."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor paused for a moment. And Nanteuil, in the silence which
+followed, heard the sound of her heart beating. She exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Continue, my dear Socrates, continue, I beg you. If you only knew how
+much good you do me by talking! You think that I am not listening to a
+word you say. But it distracts me to hear you talking of far-away
+things; it makes me feel that there is something else besides my
+entrance; it prevents me from giving way to the blues. Talk about
+anything you like, but do not stop."</p>
+
+<p>The wise Socrates, who had doubtless anticipated the benign influence
+which his speech was exerting over the actress, resumed his lecture:</p>
+
+<p>"The universe is constructed inevitably as a triangle of which two
+angles and one side are given.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page224" id="page224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+
+Future things are determined. They are
+from that moment finished. They are as if they existed. Indeed, they
+exist already. They exist to such a degree that we know them in part.
+And, if that part is infinitesimal in proportion to their immensity, it
+is none the less very appreciable in proportion to the part of
+accomplished things of which we can have any knowledge. It is
+permissible to say that, for us, the future is not much more obscure
+than the past. We know that generations will follow generations in
+labour, joy and suffering. I look beyond the duration of the human race.
+I see the constellations slowly changing in the heavens those forms of
+theirs which seem immutable; I see the Wain unharnessed from its ancient
+team, the shield of Orion broken in twain, Sirius extinguished. We know
+that the sun will rise to-morrow and that for a long time to come it
+will rise every morning amid the dense clouds or in light mists."</p>
+
+<p>Adolphe Meunier entered discreetly on tiptoe.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor grasped his hand warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"Good day, Monsieur Meunier. We can see next month's new moon. We do not
+see her as distinctly as to-night's new moon, because we do not know in
+what grey or ruddy sky she will reveal her old saucepan-lid over my
+roof, amid the stove-flues capped with pointed hats and romantic hoods,
+to the gaze of the amorous cats. But this coming rising
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page225" id="page225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+
+of the moon&mdash;if
+we were expert enough to know it in advance, in its most minute
+particulars, every one of which is essential, we should conceive as
+clear an idea of the night whereof I speak as of the night now with us;
+both would be equally present to us.</p>
+
+<p>"The knowledge that we have of the facts is the sole reason which leads
+us to believe in their reality. We know that certain facts are bound to
+occur. We must therefore believe them to be real. And, if they are real,
+they are realized. It is therefore credible, my dear Constantin Marc,
+that your play has been played a thousand years ago, or half an hour
+ago, which comes absolutely to the same thing. It is credible that we
+have all been dead for some time past. Think it, and your mind will be
+at rest."</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc, who had paid scant attention to his remarks and who did
+not perceive their relevance or their propriety, answered, in a somewhat
+irritable tone, that all that was to be found in Bossuet.</p>
+
+<p>"In Bossuet!" exclaimed the indignant physician. "I challenge you to
+show me anything resembling it in his works. Bossuet knew nothing of
+philosophy."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil turned to the doctor. She was wearing a big lawn bonnet with a
+tall round coif; it was bound tightly upon her head with a wide blue
+ribbon,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page226" id="page226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+
+and its lappets, one above another, fell on either side of her
+face, shading her forehead and cheeks. She had transformed herself into
+a fiery blonde. Reddish-brown hair fell in curls about her shoulders. An
+organdie neckerchief was crossed over her bosom and held at the waist by
+a broad purple girdle. Her white and pink striped petticoat, which
+flowed as though wet and clinging from the somewhat high waist, made her
+appear very tall. She looked like a figure in a dream.</p>
+
+<p>"Delage, too," she said, "rags one in the most rotten way. Have you
+heard what he did to Marie-Claire? They were playing together in <i>Les
+Femmes savantes</i>. He put an egg into her hand, on the stage. She
+couldn't get rid of it until the end of the act."</p>
+
+<p>On hearing the call boy's summons she went downstairs, followed by
+Constantin Marc. They heard the roar of the house, the mutterings of the
+monster, and it seemed to them that they were entering into the flaming
+mouth of the apocalyptic beast.</p>
+
+<p><i>La Grille</i> was favourably received. Coming at the end of the season,
+with little hope of a long run, it found favour with all. By the middle
+of the first act the public were conscious of the style, the poetry,
+and, here and there, the obscurities of the play. Thenceforward they
+respected it, pretended to enjoy
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page227" id="page227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+
+it, and wished they could understand
+it. They forgave the play its slight dramatic value. It was literary, and
+for once the style found acceptance.</p>
+
+<p>Constantin Marc as yet knew no one in Paris. He had invited to the
+theatre three or four landed proprietors from the Vivarais, who sat
+blushing in the stalls in their white ties, rolled their round eyes, and
+did not dare to applaud. As he had no friends nobody dreamt of spoiling
+his success. And even in the corridors there were those who set his
+talent above that of other dramatists. Greatly excited, nevertheless, he
+wandered from dressing-room to dressing-room or collapsed into a chair
+at the back of the director's stage-box. He was worrying about the
+critics.</p>
+
+<p>"Set your mind at rest," Romilly told him. "They will say of your play
+the good or bad things they think of Pradel. And for the time being they
+think more ill than good of him."</p>
+
+<p>Adolphe Meunier informed him, with a pale smile, that the house was a
+good one, and that the critics thought the play showed very careful
+writing. He expected, in return, a few complimentary words concerning
+his <i>Pandolphe et Clarimonde</i>. But it did not enter Constantin Marc's
+head to vouchsafe them.</p>
+
+<p>Romilly shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"We must look forward to slatings. Monsieur
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page228" id="page228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+
+Meunier knows it well. The
+press has shown itself ferociously unjust to him."</p>
+
+<p>"Alas," sighed Meunier, "they will never say as many hard things about
+us as were said of Shakespeare and Moli&egrave;re."</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil had a great success which was marked less by vociferous calls
+before the curtain than by the deeper and more discreet approval of
+discriminating playgoers. She had revealed qualities with which she had
+not hitherto been credited; purity of diction, nobility of pose, and a
+proud, modest grace.</p>
+
+<p>On the stage, during the last interval, the Minister congratulated her
+in person. This was a sign that the public was favourably disposed, for
+Ministers never express individual opinions. Behind the Grand Master of
+the University pressed a flattering crowd of public officials, society
+folk, and dramatic authors. With arms extended toward her like
+pump-handles they all simultaneously assured her of their admiration.
+And Madame Doulce, stifled by their numbers, left on the buttons of the
+men's garments shreds of her countless adornments of cotton lace.</p>
+
+<p>The last act was Nanteuil's triumph. She obtained better things from the
+public than tears and shouts. She won from all eyes that moist yet
+tearless gaze, from every breast that deep yet almost
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page229" id="page229">[Pg 229]</a></span>
+
+silent murmur,
+which beauty alone has power to compel.</p>
+
+<p>She felt that she had grown immeasurably in a single instant, and when
+the curtain fell she whispered:</p>
+
+<p>"This time I've done it!"</p>
+
+<p>She was unrobing herself in her dressing-room, which was filled with
+baskets of orchids, bouquets of roses, and bunches of lilac, when a
+telegram was brought to her. She tore it open. It was a message from The
+Hague containing these words:</p>
+
+<p>"My heartfelt congratulations on your undoubted success&mdash;Robert."</p>
+
+<p>Just as she finished reading it Dr. Trublet entered the dressing-room.</p>
+
+<p>She flung her arms, burning with joy and fatigue, round his neck; she
+drew him to her warm moist bosom, and planted on his meditative
+Silenus-like face a smacking kiss from her intoxicated lips.</p>
+
+<p>Socrates, who was a wise man, took the kiss as a gift from the gods,
+knowing full well that it was not intended for him, but was dedicated to
+glory and to love.</p>
+
+<p>Nanteuil realized herself that in her intoxication she had perhaps
+charged her lips with too ardent a breath, for, throwing her arms apart,
+she exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"It can't be helped! I am so happy!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page230" id="page230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<p><img src="images/a.jpg" align="left" height="50" width="45" title="A" alt="A" />t Easter an event of great importance increased her joy. She was
+engaged at the Com&eacute;die-Fran&ccedil;aise. For some time past, without mentioning
+the subject, she had been trying for this engagement. Her mother had
+helped her in the steps she had taken. Madame Nanteuil was lovable now
+that she was loved. She now wore straight corsets and petticoats that
+she could display anywhere. She frequented the offices of the Ministry,
+and it is said that, being solicited by the deputy-chief of a department
+in the Beaux-Arts, she had yielded with very good grace. At least, so
+Pradel said.</p>
+
+<p>He would exclaim joyfully:</p>
+
+<p>"You wouldn't recognize her now, Mother Nanteuil! She has become most
+desirable, and I like her better than her little vixen of a daughter.
+She has a better disposition."</p>
+
+<p>Like the rest of them, F&eacute;licie had disdained, despised, disparaged the
+Com&eacute;die-Fran&ccedil;aise. She had said, as all the others did: "I should
+hardly
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page231" id="page231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+
+care to get into that house." And no sooner did she belong to it
+than she was filled with proud and joyful exultation. What increased her
+pleasure twofold was that she was to make her debut in <i>L'&Eacute;cole des
+Femmes</i>. She already studying the part of Agn&egrave;s with an obscure old
+professor, Monsieur Maxime, of whom she thought highly because he was
+acquainted with all the traditions of the stage. At night she was
+playing C&eacute;cile in <i>La Grille</i>, and she was living in a feverish turmoil
+of work she received a letter in which Robert de Ligny informed her that
+he was returning to Paris.</p>
+
+<p>During his stay at The Hague he had made certain experiments which had
+proved to him the strength of his love for F&eacute;licie. He had had women who
+were reported to be pretty and pleasing. But neither Madame Bourmdernoot
+of Brussels, tall and fresh looking, nor the sisters Van Cruysen,
+milliners on the Vijver, nor Suzette Berger of the Folies-Marigny, then
+on tour through Northern Europe, had given him a sense of pleasure in
+its completeness. When in their company he had regretted F&eacute;licie, and
+had discovered that of all women, he desired her alone. Had it not been
+for Madame Bourmdernoot, the sisters Van Cruysen, and Suzette
+Berger, he would never have known how priceless F&eacute;licie Nanteuil was to
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page232" id="page232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+
+him. If one must be literal it may be argued that he was unfaithful to
+her. That is the correct expression. There are others which come to the
+same thing and which are not such good form. But if one looks into the
+matter more closely he had not deceived her. He had sought her, he had
+sought her out of herself and had learned that he would find her in
+herself alone. In his futile wisdom he was almost angered and alarmed;
+he was uneasy at having to stake the multitude of his desires upon so
+slender a substance, in so unique and fragile a vessel. And he loved
+F&eacute;licie all the more because he loved her with a certain depth of rage
+and hatred.</p>
+
+<p>On the very day of his arrival in Paris, he made an appointment with her
+in a bachelor's flat, which a rich colleague in the Ministry of Foreign
+Affairs had placed at his disposal. It was situated in the Avenue de
+l'Alma, on the ground-floor of an attractive-looking house, and
+consisted of a couple of small rooms hung with a design of suns with
+brown hearts and golden rays, which rose, uniform, peaceful, and
+shadowless on the cheerful wall. The rooms were modern in style; the
+furniture was of a pale green, decorated with flowering branches; its
+outlines followed the gentle curves of the liliaceous plants, and
+assumed something of the tender feeling of moist vegetation.
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page233" id="page233">[Pg 233]</a></span>
+
+The
+cheval-glass leant slightly forward in its frame of bulbous plants of
+supple form, terminating in closed corollas, and in this frame the
+mirror had the coolness of water. A white bearskin lay stretched at the
+foot of the bed.</p>
+
+<p>"You! You! It's you!" was all she could say.</p>
+
+<p>She saw the pupils of his eyes shining and heavy with desire, and while
+she gazed at him a cloud gathered before her eyes. The subtle fire of
+her blood, the burning of her loins, the warm breath of her lungs, the
+fiery colour of her face, were all blended in her mouth, and she pressed
+on her lover's lips a long, long kiss, a kiss pregnant with all these
+fires and as fresh as a flower in the dew.</p>
+
+<p>They asked one another twenty things at a time, and their questions
+intermingled.</p>
+
+<p>"Were you wretched, Robert, when you were away from me?"</p>
+
+<p>"So you are making your d&eacute;but at the Com&eacute;die?</p>
+
+<p>"Is The Hague a pretty place?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a quiet little town. Red, grey, yellow houses, with stepped
+gables, green shutters, and geraniums at the windows."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do there?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not much. I walked round the Vijver."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page234" id="page234">[Pg 234]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You did not go with women, I should hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, upon my word. How pretty you are, my darling! Are you well again
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am cured."</p>
+
+<p>And in sudden entreaty she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Robert, I love you. Do not leave me. If you were to leave me I know for
+certain I could never take another lover. And what would become of me?
+You know that I can't do without love."</p>
+
+<p>He replied brusquely, in a harsh voice, that he loved her only too well,
+that he thought of nothing but of her.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm going crazy with it."</p>
+
+<p>His harshness delighted and reassured her better than the nerveless
+tenderness of oaths and promises could have done. She smiled and began
+to undress herself generously.</p>
+
+<p>"When do you make your d&eacute;but at the Com&eacute;die?"</p>
+
+<p>"This very month."</p>
+
+<p>She opened her little bag, and took from it, together with her
+face-powder, her call for the rehearsal, which she held out to Robert.
+It was a source of unending delight to her to gaze admiringly at this
+document, because it bore the heading of the Com&eacute;die, with the remote
+and awe-inspiring date of its foundation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page235" id="page235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You see, I make my d&eacute;but as Agn&egrave;s in <i>L'&Eacute;cole des Femmes</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"It's a fine part."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you."</p>
+
+<p>And, while she was undressing, the lines surged to her lips, and she
+whispered them:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Moi, j'ai bless&eacute; quelqu'un? fis-je tout &eacute;tonn&eacute;e<br />
+Oui, dit-elle, bless&eacute;; mais bless&eacute; tout de bon;<br />
+Et c'est l'homme qu'hier vous v&icirc;tes au balcon<br />
+Las! qui pourrait, lui dis-je, en avoir &eacute;t&eacute; cause?<br />
+Sur lui, sans y penser, fis-je choir quelque chose?"</p>
+
+<p>"You see, I have not grown thin."</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Non, dit-elle, vos yeux ont fait ce coup fatal,<br />
+Et c'est de leurs regards qu'est venu tout son mal."</p>
+
+<p>"If anything, I am a little plumper, but not too much."</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"H&eacute;, mon Dieu! ma surprise est, fis-je, sans seconde;<br />
+Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"</p>
+
+<p>He listened to the lines with pleasure. If on the one hand he did not
+know much more of the literature of bygone days or of French tradition
+than his youthful contemporaries, he had more taste and more lively
+interests. And, like all Frenchmen, he loved Moli&egrave;re, understood him,
+and felt him profoundly.</p>
+
+<p>"It's delightful," he said. "Now, come to me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page236" id="page236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She let her chemise slip downwards with a calm and beneficent grace.
+But, because she wished to make herself desired, and because she loved
+comedy, she began Agn&egrave;s' narrative:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"J'&eacute;tais sur le balcon &agrave; travailler au frais,<br />
+Lorsque je vis passer sous les arbres d'aupr&egrave;s<br />
+Un jeune homme bien fait qui, rencontrant ma vue...."</p>
+
+<p>He called her, and drew her to him. She glided from his arms, and,
+advancing toward the mirror, she continued to recite and act before the
+glass.</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"D'une humble r&eacute;v&eacute;rence aussit&ocirc;t me salue."</p>
+
+<p>Bending her knee, at first slightly, then lower, then, with her left leg
+brought forward, and her right thrown, back, she curtsied deeply.</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Moi, pour ne point manquer &agrave; la civilit&eacute;,<br />
+Je fis la r&eacute;v&eacute;rence aussi de mon c&ocirc;t&eacute;."</p>
+
+<p>He called her more urgently. But she dropped a second curtsy, the pauses
+of which she accentuated with amusing precision. And she went on
+reciting and dropping curtsies at the places indicated by the text and
+by the traditions of the stage.</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Soudain il me refait une autre r&eacute;v&eacute;rence;<br />
+Moi, j'en refais de m&ecirc;me une autre en diligence;<br />
+Et lui, d'une troisi&egrave;me aussit&ocirc;t repartant,<br />
+D'une troisi&egrave;me aussi j'y repars &agrave; l'instant."</p>
+
+<p>She executed every detail of stage business,
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page237" id="page237">[Pg 237]</a></span>
+
+seriously and
+conscientiously, taking pains to give a perfect rendering. Her poses,
+some of which were disconcerting, requiring as they did a skirt to
+explain them, were almost all pretty, while all were interesting,
+inasmuch as they brought into relief the firm muscles under the soft
+envelope of a young body, and revealed at every movement correspondences
+and harmonies which are not commonly observed.</p>
+
+<p>When clothing her nudity with the propriety of her attitudes and the
+ingenuousness of her expressions she was the incarnation, through mere
+chance and caprice, of a gem of art, an allegory of Innocence in the
+style of Allegrain or Clodion. And the great lines of the comedy rang
+out with delicious purity from this animated figurine. Robert,
+enthralled in spite of himself, suffered her to go on to the very end.
+What entertained him above all was that the most public of all things, a
+stage scene, should be presented to him in so private and secret a
+fashion. And, while watching the ceremonious actions of this girl in all
+her nudity, he was at the same time revelling in the philosophical
+pleasure of discovering how dignity is produced in the best social
+circles.</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Il passe, vient, repasse et toujours de plus belle<br />
+Me fait &agrave; chaque fois une r&eacute;v&eacute;rence nouvelle,<br />
+Et moi qui tous ses tours fixement regardais,<br />
+Nouvelle r&eacute;v&eacute;rence aussi je lui rendais...."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page238" id="page238">[Pg 238]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the meantime she admired in the mirror her freshly-budded breasts,
+her supple waist, her arms, a trifle slender, round and tapering, and
+her smooth, beautiful knees; and, seeing all this subservient to the
+fine art of comedy, she became animated and exalted; a slight flush,
+like rouge, tinted her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">"Tant que si sur ce point la nuit ne f&ucirc;t venue,<br />
+Toujours comme cela je me serais tenue,<br />
+Ne voulaut point c&eacute;der, ni recevoir l'ennui<br />
+Qu'il me p&ucirc;t estimer moins civile que lui...."</p>
+
+<p>He called to her from the bed, where he was lying on his elbow.</p>
+
+<p>"Now come!"</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon, full of animation and with heightened colour, she exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think that I, too, love you!"</p>
+
+<p>She flung herself beside her lover. Supple and wholly surrendered, she
+threw back her head, offering to his kisses her eyes veiled with shadowy
+lashes and her half-parted lips, from which gleamed a moist flash of
+white.</p>
+
+<p>Of a sudden she started to her knees. Her staring eyes were filled with
+unspeakable terror. A hoarse scream escaped from her throat, followed by
+a wail as long drawn out and gentle as an organ note. Turning her head,
+she pointed to the white fur spread out at the foot of the bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="page239" id="page239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"There! There! He is lying there like a crouching dog, with a hole in
+his head. He is looking at me, with the blood trickling from the corner
+of his mouth."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes, wide open, rolled up, showing the whites. Her body stretched
+backward like a bow, and, when it had recovered its suppleness, she fell
+as if dead.</p>
+
+<p>He bathed her temples with cold water, and brought her back to
+consciousness. In a childlike voice she whimpered that every joint in
+her body was broken. Feeling a burning sensation in the hollow of her
+hand, she looked, and saw that the palm was cut and bleeding.</p>
+
+<p>She said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's my nails, they've gone into my hand. See, my nails are full of
+blood!"</p>
+
+<p>She thanked him tenderly for his ministrations, and apologized sweetly
+for causing him so much trouble.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not for that you came, was it?"</p>
+
+<p>She tried to smile, and looked around her.</p>
+
+<p>"It's nice, here."</p>
+
+<p>Her gaze met the call to rehearsal lying open on the bedside table, and
+she sighed:</p>
+
+<p>"What is the use of my being a great actress if I am not happy?"</p>
+
+<p>Without realizing it, she was repeating word for word
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="page240" id="page240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+
+what Chevalier
+had said when she rejected his advances.</p>
+
+<p>Then, raising her still stupefied head from the pillow in which it had
+lain buried, she turned her mournful eyes toward her lover, and said to
+him resignedly:</p>
+
+<p>"We did indeed love each other, we two. It is over. We shall never again
+belong to each other; no, never. He forbids it!"</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>Transcriber's Note</h3>
+
+<p class="center">The following typos have been corrected.</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="left">Page</td><td align="left">Typo</td><td align="left">Correction</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">92</td><td align="left">disease.</td><td align="left">disease."</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">103</td><td align="left">Saint-Etienne-du-Mont</td><td align="left">Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">104</td><td align="left">Saint-&Ecirc;tienne-du-Mont</td><td align="left">Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">138</td><td align="left">dimunitive</td><td align="left">diminutive</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">141</td><td align="left">magificent</td><td align="left">magnificent</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">141</td><td align="left">Saint-&Ecirc;tienne-du-Mont</td><td align="left">Saint-&Eacute;tienne-du-Mont</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p class="center">The following inconsistent hyphenations in the source text were left
+unchanged:</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+ill-will/illwill<br />
+fire-place/fireplace<br />
+box-wood/boxwood</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Mummer's Tale, by Anatole France
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Mummer's Tale
+
+Author: Anatole France
+
+Translator: Charles E. Roche
+
+Release Date: June 9, 2006 [EBook #18545]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MUMMER'S TALE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by R. Cedron, Verity White, Henry Craig and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE
+IN AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
+EDITED BY J. LEWIS MAY AND
+BERNARD MIALL
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+(HISTOIRE COMIQUE)
+
+
+
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+BY ANATOLE FRANCE
+
+A TRANSLATION BY
+CHARLES E. ROCHE
+
+LONDON, JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMXXI
+
+WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER                                   PAGE
+
+    I.                                       1
+
+   II.                                      21
+
+  III.                                      26
+
+   IV.                                      41
+
+    V.                                      63
+
+   VI.                                      71
+
+  VII.                                      82
+
+ VIII.                                      97
+
+   IX.                                     108
+
+    X.                                     137
+
+   XI.                                     166
+
+  XII.                                     176
+
+ XIII.                                     181
+
+  XIV.                                     186
+
+   XV.                                     194
+
+  XVI.                                     197
+
+ XVII.                                     205
+
+XVIII.                                     212
+
+  XIX.                                     220
+
+   XX.                                     230
+
+
+
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+
+
+
+A MUMMER'S TALE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The scene was an actress's dressing-room at the Odeon.
+
+Felicie Nanteuil, her hair powdered, with blue on her eyelids, rouge on
+her cheeks and ears, and white on her neck and shoulders, was holding
+out her foot to Madame Michon, the dresser, who was fitting on a pair of
+little black slippers with red heels. Dr. Trublet, the physician
+attached to the theatre, and a friend of the actress's, was resting his
+bald cranium on a cushion of the divan, his hands folded upon his
+stomach and his short legs crossed.
+
+"What else, my dear?" he inquired of her.
+
+"Oh, I don't know! Fits of suffocation; giddiness; and, all of a sudden,
+an agonizing pain, as if I were going to die. That's the worst of all."
+
+"Do you sometimes feel as though you must laugh or cry for no apparent
+reason, about nothing at all?"
+
+"That I cannot tell you, for in this life one has so many reasons for
+laughing or crying!"
+
+"Are you subject to attacks of dizziness?"
+
+"No. But, just think, doctor, at night, I see an imaginary cat, under
+the chairs or the table, gazing at me with fiery eyes!"
+
+"Try not to dream of cats any more," said Madame Michon, "because that's
+a bad omen. To see a cat is a sign that you'll be betrayed by friends,
+or deceived by a woman."
+
+"But it is not in my dreams that I see a cat! It's when I'm wide awake!"
+
+Trublet, who was in attendance at the Odeon once a month only, was given
+to looking in as a friend almost every evening. He was fond of the
+actresses, delighted in chatting with them, gave them good advice, and
+listened with delicacy to their confidences. He promised Felicie that he
+would write her a prescription at once.
+
+"We'll attend to the stomach, my dear child, and you'll see no more cats
+under the chairs and tables."
+
+Madame Michon was adjusting the actress's stays. The doctor, suddenly
+gloomy, watched her tugging at the laces.
+
+"Don't scowl," said Felicie. "I am never tight-laced. With my waist I
+should surely be a fool if I were." And she added, thinking of her best
+friend in the theatre, "It's all very well for Fagette, who has no
+shoulders and no hips; she's simply straight up and down. Michon, you
+can pull a little tighter still. I know you are no lover of waists,
+doctor. Nevertheless, I cannot wear swaddling bands like those aesthetic
+creatures. Just slip your hand into my stays, and you'll see that I
+don't squeeze myself too tight."
+
+He denied that he was inimical to stays; he only condemned them when too
+tightly laced. He deplored the fact that women should have no sense of
+the harmony of line; that they should associate with smallness of the
+waist an idea of grace and beauty, not realizing that their beauty
+resided wholly in those modulations through which the body, having
+displayed the superb expansion of chest and bosom, tapers off gradually
+below the thorax, to glorify itself in the calm and generous width of
+the flanks.
+
+"The waist," he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that
+hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from
+one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you
+stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the
+breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a
+horrible furrow above the navel. The negresses, who file their teeth
+down to a point, and split their lips, in order to insert a wooden disc,
+disfigure themselves in a less barbarous fashion. For, after all, some
+feminine splendour still remains to a creature who wears rings in the
+cartilage of her nose, and whose lip is distended by a circular disc of
+mahogany as big as this pomade pot. But the devastation is complete when
+woman carries her ravages into the sacred centre of her empire."
+
+Dwelling upon a favourite subject, he enumerated one by one the
+deformities of the bones and muscles caused by the wearing of stays, in
+terms now fanciful, now precise, now droll, now lugubrious.
+
+Nanteuil laughed as she listened. She laughed because, being a woman,
+she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty;
+because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and
+actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her
+of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a
+caricature. Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted in
+her own young body as she pictured to herself all these indignities of
+the flesh. With a ringing laugh she crossed the dressing-room towards
+the doctor, dragging with her Madame Michon, who was holding on to her
+stay-laces as though they were reins, with the look of a sorceress being
+whisked away to a witches' sabbath.
+
+"Don't be afraid!" she said.
+
+And she objected that peasant women, who never wore stays, had far
+worse figures than town-bred women.
+
+The doctor bitterly inveighed against the Western civilizations because
+of their contempt for and ignorance of natural beauty.
+
+Trublet, born within the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, had gone as a young
+man to practise in Cairo. He brought back from that city a little money,
+a liver complaint, and a knowledge of the various customs of humanity.
+When at a ripe age, he returned to his own country, he rarely strayed
+from his ancient Rue de Seine, thoroughly enjoying his life, save that
+it depressed him a trifle to see how little able his contemporaries were
+to realize the deplorable misunderstandings which for eighteen centuries
+had kept humanity at cross-purposes with nature.
+
+There was a tap at the door.
+
+"It's only me!" exclaimed a woman's voice in the passage.
+
+Felicie, slipping on her pink petticoat, begged the doctor to open the
+door.
+
+Enter Madame Doulce, a lady who was allowing her massive person to run
+to seed, although she had long contrived to hold it together on the
+boards, compelling it to assume the dignity proper to aristocratic
+mothers.
+
+"Well, my dear! How-d'ye-do, doctor! Felicie, you know I am not one to
+pay compliments. Nevertheless, I saw you the day before yesterday, and I
+assure you that in the second of _La Mere confidente_ you put in some
+excellent touches, which are far from easy to bring off."
+
+Nanteuil, with smiling eyes, waited--as is always the case when one has
+received a compliment--for another.
+
+Madame Doulce, thus invited by Nanteuil's silence, murmured some
+additional words of praise:
+
+"...excellent touches, genuinely individual business!"
+
+"You really think so, Madame Doulce? Glad to hear it, for I don't feel
+the part. And then that great Perrin woman upsets me altogether. It is a
+fact. When I sit on the creature's knees, it makes me feel as if----You
+don't know all the horrors that she whispers into my ear while we are on
+the stage! She's crazy! I understand everything, but there are some
+things which disgust me. Michon, don't my stays crease at the back, on
+the right?"
+
+"My dear child," cried Trublet with enthusiasm, "you have just said
+something that is really admirable."
+
+"What?" inquired Nanteuil simply.
+
+"You said: 'I understand everything, but there are some things which
+disgust me.' You understand everything; the thoughts and actions of men
+appear to you as particular instances of the universal mechanics, but in
+respect of them you cherish neither hatred nor anger. But there are
+things which disgust you; you have a fastidious taste, and it is
+profoundly true that morals are a matter of taste. My child, I could
+wish that the Academy of Moral Science thought as sanely as you. Yes.
+You are quite right. As regards the instincts which you attribute to
+your fellow-actress, it is as futile to blame her for them as to blame
+lactic acid for being an acid possessing mixed properties."
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+"I am saying that we can no longer assign praise or blame to any human
+thought or action, once the inevitable nature of such thoughts and
+actions has been proved for us."
+
+"So you approve of the morals of that gawk of a Perrin, do you? You, a
+member of the Legion of Honour! A nice thing, to be sure!"
+
+The doctor heaved himself up.
+
+"My child," he said, "give me a moment's attention; I am going to tell
+you an instructive story:
+
+"In times gone by, human nature was other than it is to-day. There were
+then not men and women only, but also hermaphrodites; in other words,
+beings in whom the two sexes were combined. These three kinds of human
+beings possessed four arms, four legs, and two faces. They were robust
+and rotated rapidly on their own axes, just like wheels. Their strength
+inspired them with audacity to war with the gods, therein following the
+example of the Giants, Jupiter, unable to brook such insolence----"
+
+"Michon, doesn't my petticoat hang too low on the left?" asked Nanteuil.
+
+"Resolved," continued the doctor, "to render them less strong and less
+daring. He divided each into two, so that they had now but two arms, two
+legs, and one head apiece, and thenceforward the human race became what
+it is to-day. Consequently, each of us is only the half of a human
+being, divided from the other half, just as one divides a sole into two
+portions. These halves are ever seeking their other halves. The love
+which we experience for one another is nothing but an invisible force
+impelling us to reunite our two halves in order to re-establish
+ourselves in our pristine perfection. Those men who result from the
+divisions of hermaphrodites love women; those women who have a similar
+origin love men. But the women who proceed from the division of
+primitive women do not bestow much attention upon men, but are drawn
+toward their own sex. So do not be astonished when you see----"
+
+"Did you invent that precious story, doctor?" inquired Nanteuil, pinning
+a rose in her bodice.
+
+The doctor protested that he had not invented a word of it. On the
+contrary, he had, he said, left out part of the story.
+
+"So much the better?" exclaimed Nanteuil. "For I must tell you that the
+person who did invent it is not particularly brilliant."
+
+"He is dead," remarked Trublet.
+
+Nanteuil once more expressed her disgust of her fellow-actress, but
+Madame Doulce, who was prudent and occasionally took _dejeuner_ with
+Jeanne Perrin, changed the subject.
+
+"Well, my darling, so you've got the part of Angelique. Only remember
+what I told you: your gestures should be somewhat restrained, and you
+yourself a little stiff. That is the secret of the _ingenue_. Beware of
+your charming natural suppleness. Young girls in a 'stock' piece ought
+to be just a trifle doll-like. It's good form. The costume requires it.
+You see, Felicie, what you must do above all, when you are playing in
+_La Mere confidente_, which is a delightful play----"
+
+"Oh," interrupted Felicie, "so long as I have a good part, I don't care
+a fig for the play. Besides, I am not particularly in love with
+Marivaux----What are you laughing at, doctor? Have I put my foot in it?
+Isn't _La Mere confidente_ by Marivaux?"
+
+"To be sure it is!"
+
+"Well, then? You are always trying to muddle me. I was saying that
+Angelique gets on my nerves. I should prefer a part with more meat in
+it, something out of the ordinary. This evenings especially, the part
+gives me the creeps."
+
+"All the more likely that you'll do well in it, my pet," said Madame
+Doulce. "We never enter more thoroughly into our parts than when we do
+so by main force, and in spite of ourselves. I could give you many
+examples. I myself, in _La Vivandiere d'Austerlitz_, staggered the house
+by my gaiety of tone, when I had just been informed that my Doulce, so
+great an artist and so good a husband, had had an epileptic fit in the
+orchestra at the Odeon, just as he was picking up his cornet."
+
+"Why do they insist on my being nothing but an _ingenue_?" inquired
+Nanteuil, who wanted to play the woman in love, the brilliant coquette,
+and every part a woman could play.
+
+"That is quite natural," persisted Madame Doulce. "Comedy is an
+imitative art; and you imitate an art all the better for not feeling it
+yourself."
+
+"Do not delude yourself, my child," said the doctor to Felicie. "Once an
+_ingenue_, always an _ingenue_. You are born an Angelique or a Dorine, a
+Celimene or a Madame Pernelle. On the stage, some women are always
+twenty, others are always thirty, others again are always sixty. As for
+you, Mademoiselle Nanteuil, you will always be eighteen, and you will
+always be an _ingenue_."
+
+"I am quite content with my work," replied Nanteuil, "but you cannot
+expect me to play all _ingenues_ with the same pleasure. There is one
+part, for example, which I long to play, and that is Agnes in _L'Ecole
+des femmes_."
+
+At the mere mention of the name of Agnes, the doctor murmured
+delightedly from among his cushions:
+
+  "Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"
+
+"Agnes, that's a part if you like!" exclaimed Nanteuil. "I have asked
+Pradel to give it me."
+
+Pradel, the manager of the theatre, was an ex-comedian, a wideawake,
+genial fellow, who had got rid of his illusions and nourished no
+exaggerated hopes. He loved peace, books and women. Nanteuil had every
+reason to speak well of Pradel, and she referred to him without any
+feeling of ill will, and with frank directness.
+
+"It was shameful, disgusting, rotten of him," she said. "He wouldn't let
+me play Agnes and gave the part to Falempin. I must say, though, that
+when I asked him I didn't go the right way about it. While she knows how
+to tackle him, if you like! But what do I care! If Pradel doesn't let
+me play Agnes, he can go to the deuce, and his dirty Punch and Judy show
+too!"
+
+Madame Doulce continued to lavish her unheeded precepts. She was an
+actress of merits but she was old and worn out, and no longer obtained
+any engagements. She gave advice to beginners, wrote their letters for
+them, and thus, in the morning or evenings earned what was almost every
+day her only meal.
+
+"Doctor," asked Felicie, while Madame Michon was fastening a black
+velvet ribbon round her neck: "You say that my fits of dizziness are due
+to my stomach. Are you sure of that?"
+
+Before Trublet could answer, Madame Doulce exclaimed that fits of
+dizziness always proceeded from the stomach, and that two or three hours
+after meals she experienced a feeling of distension in hers, and she
+thereupon asked the doctor for a remedy.
+
+Felicie, however, was thinking, for she was capable of thought.
+
+"Doctor," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question, which you
+may possibly think a droll one; but I do really want to know whether,
+considering that you know just what there is in the human body, and that
+you have seen all the things we have inside us, it doesn't embarrass
+you, at certain moments, in your dealings with women?  It seems to me
+that the idea of all that must disgust you."
+
+From the depths of his cushions Trublet, wafting a kiss to Felicie,
+replied:
+
+"My dear child, there is no more exquisitely delicate, rich, and
+beautiful tissue than the skin of a pretty woman. That is what I was
+telling myself just now, while contemplating the back of your neck, and
+you will readily understand that, under such an impression----"
+
+She made a grimace at him like that of a disdainful monkey.
+
+"You think it witty, I suppose, to talk nonsense when anyone asks you a
+serious question?"
+
+"Well, then, since you wish it, mademoiselle, you shall have an
+instructive answer. Some twenty years ago we had, in the post-mortem
+room at the Hopital Saint-Joseph, a drunken old watchman, named Daddy
+Rousseau, who every day at eleven o'clock used to lunch at the end of
+the table on which the corpse was lying. He ate his lunch because he was
+hungry. Nothing prevents people who are hungry from eating as soon as
+they have got something to eat. Only Daddy Rousseau used to say: 'I
+don't know whether it is because of the atmosphere of the room, but I
+must have something fresh and appetizing.'"
+
+"I understand," said Felicie. "Little flower-girls are what you want.
+But you mustn't, you know. And there you are seated like a Turk and you
+haven't written out my prescription yet." She cast an inquiring glance
+at him. "Where is the stomach exactly?"
+
+The door had remained ajar. A young man, a very pretty fellow and
+extremely fashionable, pushed it open, and, having taken a couple of
+steps into the dressing-room, inquired politely whether he might come
+in.
+
+"Oh, it's you!" said Nanteuil. And she stretched out her hand, which he
+kissed with pleasure, ceremony and fatuity.
+
+"How are you, Doctor Socrates?" he inquired, without wasting any
+particular courtesies on Madame Doulce.
+
+Trublet was often accosted in this manner, because of his snub-nose and
+his subtle speech. Pointing to Nanteuil, he said:
+
+"Monsieur de Ligny, you see before you a young lady who is not quite
+sure whether she has a stomach. It is a serious question. We advise her
+to refer, for the answer, to the little girl who ate too much jam. Her
+mother said to her: 'You will injure your stomach.' The child replied:
+'It's only ladies who have stomachs; little girls haven't any.'"
+
+"Heavens, how silly you are, doctor!" cried Nanteuil.
+
+"I would you spoke the truth, mademoiselle. Silliness is the capacity
+for happiness. It is the sovereign content. It is the prime asset in a
+civilized society."
+
+"You are paradoxical, my dear doctor," remarked Monsieur de Ligny. "But
+I grant you that it is better to be silly as everybody is silly than to
+be clever as no one else is clever."
+
+"It's true, what Robert says!" exclaimed Nanteuil, sincerely impressed.
+And she added thoughtfully: "At any rate, doctor, one thing is certain.
+It is that stupidity often prevents one from doing stupid things. I have
+noticed that many a time. Whether you take men or women, those are not
+the most stupid who act the most stupidly. For example, there are
+intelligent women who are stupid about men."
+
+"You mean those who cannot do without them."
+
+"There's no hiding anything from you, my little Socrates."
+
+"Ah," sighed the big Doulce, "what a terrible slavery it is! Every woman
+who cannot control her senses is lost to art."
+
+Nanteuil shrugged her pretty shoulders, which still retained something
+of the angularity of youth.
+
+"Oh, my great-grandmother! Don't try to kid the youngsters! What an
+idea! In your days, did actresses control their--how did you put it?
+Fiddlesticks! They didn't control them a scrap!"
+
+Noticing that Nanteuil's temper was rising, the bulky Doulce retired
+with dignity and prudence. Once in the passage, she vouchsafed a further
+word of advice:
+
+"Remember, my darling, to play Angelique as a 'bud.' The part requires
+it."
+
+But Nanteuil, her nerves on edge, took no notice.
+
+"Really," she said, sitting down before her dressing-table, "she makes
+me boil, that old Doulce, with her morality. Does she think people have
+forgotten her adventures? If so, she is mistaken. Madame Ravaud tells
+one of them six days out of seven. Everybody knows that she reduced her
+husband, the musician, to such a state of exhaustion that one night he
+tumbled into his cornet. As for her lovers, magnificent men, just ask
+Madame Michon. Why, in less than two years she made mere shadows of
+them, mere puffs of breath. That's the way she controlled them! And
+supposing anyone had told her that she was lost to art!"
+
+Dr. Trublet extended his two hands, palms outward, towards Nanteuil, as
+though to stop her.
+
+"Do not excite yourself, my child. Madame Doulce is sincere. She used
+to love men, now she loves God. One loves what one can, as one can, and
+with what one has. She has become chaste and pious at the fitting age.
+She is diligent in the practices of her religion: she goes to Mass on
+Sundays and feast days, she----"
+
+"Well, she is right to go to Mass," asserted Nanteuil "Michon, light a
+candle for me, to heat my rouge. I must do my lips again. Certainly, she
+is quite right to go to Mass, but religion does not forbid one to have a
+lover."
+
+"You think not?" asked the doctor.
+
+"I know my religion better than you, that's certain!"
+
+A lugubrious bell sounded, and the mournful voice of the call-boy was
+heard in the corridors:
+
+"The curtain-raiser is over!"
+
+Nanteuil rose, and slipped over her wrist a velvet ribbon ornamented
+with a steel medallion. Madame Michon was on her knees arranging the
+three Watteau pleats of the pink dress, and, with her mouth full of
+pins, delivered herself from one corner of her lips of the following
+maxim:
+
+"There is one good thing in being old, men cannot make you suffer any
+more."
+
+Robert de Ligny took a cigarette from his case.
+
+"May I?" And he moved toward the lighted candle on the dressing-table.
+
+Nanteuil, who never took her eyes off him, saw beneath his moustache,
+red and light as flame, his lips, ruddy in the candlelight, drawing in
+and puffing out the smoke. She felt a slight warmth in her ears.
+Pretending to look among her trinkets, she grazed Ligny's neck with her
+lips, and whispered to him:
+
+"Wait for me after the show, in a cab, at the corner of the Rue de
+Tournon."
+
+At this moment the sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the
+corridor. The actors in the curtain-raiser were returning to their
+dressing-rooms.
+
+"Doctor, pass me your newspaper."
+
+"It is highly uninteresting, mademoiselle."
+
+"Never mind, pass it over."
+
+She took it and held it like a screen above her head.
+
+"The light makes my eyes ache," she observed.
+
+It was true that a too brilliant light would sometimes give her a
+headache. But she had just seen herself in the glass. With her
+blue-tinted eyelids, her eyelashes smeared with a black paste, her
+grease-painted cheeks, her lips tinted red in the shape of a tiny heart,
+it seemed to her she looked like a painted corpse with glass eyes, and
+she did not wish Ligny to see her thus.
+
+While she was keeping her face in the shadow of the newspaper a tall,
+lean young man entered the dressing-room with a swaggering gait. His
+melancholy eyes were deeply sunken above a nose like a crow's beak; his
+mouth was set in a petrified grin. The Adam's apple of his long throat
+made a deep shadow on his stock. He was dressed as a stage bailiff.
+
+"That you, Chevalier? How are you, my friend?" gaily inquired Dr.
+Trublet, who was fond of actors, preferred the bad ones, and had a
+special liking for Chevalier.
+
+"Come in, everybody!" cried Nanteuil "This isn't a dressing-room; it's a
+mill."
+
+"My respects, none the less, Mme. Miller!" replied Chevalier, "I warn
+you, there's a pack of idiots out in front. Would you believe it--they
+shut me up!"
+
+"That's no reason for walking in without knocking," replied Nanteuil
+snappishly.
+
+The doctor pointed out that Monsieur de Ligny had left the door open;
+whereupon Nanteuil, turning to Ligny, said in a tone of tender reproach:
+
+"Did you really leave the door open? But, when one comes into a room,
+one closes the door on other people: it is one of the first things one
+is taught."
+
+She wrapped herself in a white blanket-cloak.
+
+The call-boy summoned the players to the stage.
+
+She grasped the hand which Ligny offered her, and, exploring his wrist
+with her fingers, dug her nail into the spot, close to the veins, where
+the skin is tender. Then she disappeared into the dark corridor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Chevalier, having resumed his ordinary clothes, sat in a corner box,
+beside Madame Doulce, gazing at Felicie, a small remote figure on the
+stage. And remembering the days when he had held her in his arms, in his
+attic in the Rue des Martyrs, he wept with grief and rage.
+
+They had met last year at a fete given under the patronage of Lecureuil,
+the deputy; a benefit performance given in aid of poor actors of the
+ninth _arrondissement_. He had prowled around her, dumb, famishing, and
+with blazing eyes. For a whole fortnight he had pursued her incessantly.
+Cold and unmoved, she had appeared to ignore him. Then, suddenly, she
+surrendered; so suddenly that when he left her that day, still radiant
+and amazed, he had said a stupid thing. He had told her: "And I took you
+for a little bit of china!" For three whole months he had tasted joys
+acute as pain. Then Felicie had grown elusive, remote, and estranged.
+She loved him no longer. He sought the reason, but could not discover
+it. It tortured him to know that he was no longer loved; jealousy
+tortured him still more. It was true that in the first beautiful hours
+of his love he had known that Felicie had a lover, one Girmandel, a
+court bailiff, who lived in the Rue de Provence, and he had felt it
+deeply. But as he never saw him he had formed so confused and
+ill-defined an idea of him that his jealousy lost itself in uncertainty.
+Felicie assured him that she had never been more than passive in her
+intercourse with Girmandel, that she had not even pretended to care for
+him. He believed her, and this belief gave him the keenest satisfaction.
+She also told him that for a long time past, for months, Girmandel had
+been nothing more than a friend, and he believed her. In short, he was
+deceiving the bailiff, and it was agreeable to him to feel that he
+enjoyed this advantage. He had learned also that Felicie, who was just
+finishing her second year at the Conservatoire, had not denied herself
+to her professor. But the grief which he had felt because of this was
+softened by a time-honoured and venerable custom. Now Robert de Ligny
+was causing him intolerable suffering. For some time past he had found
+him incessantly dangling about her. He could not doubt that she loved
+Robert; and although he sometimes told himself that she had not yet
+given herself to this man, it was not that he believed it, but merely
+that he was fain sometimes to mitigate the bitterness of his
+sufferings.
+
+Mechanical applause broke out at the back of the theatre, and a few
+members of the orchestra, murmuring inaudibly, clapped their hands
+slowly and noiselessly. Nanteuil had just given her last reply to Jeanne
+Perrin.
+
+"_Brava! Brava!_ She is delightful, dear little woman!" sighed Madame
+Doulce.
+
+In his jealous anger, Chevalier was disloyal. Lifting a finger to his
+forehead, he remarked:
+
+"She plays with _that_." Then, placing his hand upon his heart, he
+added: "It is with this that one should act."
+
+"Thanks, dear friend, thanks!" murmured Madame Doulce, who read into
+these maxims an obvious eulogy of herself.
+
+She was, indeed, in the habit of asserting that all good acting comes
+from the heart; she maintained that, to give full expression to a
+passion, it was necessary to experience it, and to feel in one's own
+person the expressions that one wished to represent. She was fond of
+referring to herself as an example of this. When appearing as a tragedy
+queen, after draining a goblet of poison on the stage, her bowels had
+been on fire all night. Nevertheless she was given to saying: "The
+dramatic art is an imitative art, and one imitates an emotion all the
+better for not having experienced it." And to illustrate this maxim she
+drew yet further examples from her triumphant career.
+
+She gave a deep sigh.
+
+"The child is admirably gifted. But she is to be pitied; she has been
+born into a bad period. There is no longer a public nowadays; no
+critics, no plays, no theatres, no artists. It is a decadence of art."
+
+Chevalier shook his head.
+
+"No need to pity her," he said. "She will have all that she can wish;
+she will succeed; she will be wealthy. She is a selfish little jade, and
+a woman who is selfish can get anything she likes. But for people with
+hearts there's nothing left but to hang a stone round one's neck and
+throw oneself into the river. But, I too, I shall go far. I, too, shall
+climb high. I, too, will be a selfish hound."
+
+He got up and went out without waiting for the end of the play. He did
+not return to Felicie's dressing-room for fear of meeting Ligny there,
+the sight of whom was insupportable, and because by avoiding it he could
+pretend to himself that Ligny had not returned thither.
+
+Conscious of physical distress on going away from her, he took five or
+six turns under the dark, deserted arcades of the Odeon, went down the
+steps into the night, and turned up the Rue de Medicis. Coachmen were
+dozing on their boxes, while waiting for the end of the performance, and
+high over the tops of the plane-trees the moon was racing through the
+clouds. Treasuring in his heart an absurd yet soothing remnant of hope,
+he went, this night, as on other nights, to wait for Felicie at her
+mother's flat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Madame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth
+story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened
+upon the garden of the Luxembourg. She gave Chevalier a friendly
+welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved Felicie, and
+because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle
+the fact that he had been her daughter's lover.
+
+She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was
+burning in the stove. In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with
+golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall. They were hung
+about a woman's cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of
+tin-plate; a piece of armour which Felicie had worn last winter, while
+still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc
+at the house of a spiritualistic duchess. An officer's widow and the
+mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean,
+treasured these trophies.
+
+"Felicie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier. I don't expect her before
+midnight. She is on the stage till the end of the play."
+
+"I know; I was in the first piece. I left the theatre after the first
+act of _La Mere confidente_.
+
+"Oh, Monsieur Chevalier, why didn't you stay till the end? My daughter
+would have been so pleased if you had waited. When one is acting one
+likes to have friends in the house."
+
+Chevalier replied ambiguously:
+
+"Oh, as to friends, there are plenty of those about."
+
+"You are mistaken, Monsieur Chevalier; good friends are scarce. Madame
+Doulce was there, of course? Was she pleased with Felicie?" And she
+added, with great humility: "I should indeed be happy if she could
+really make a hit. It is so difficult to come to the fore in her
+profession, for a girl who is alone, without support, without influence!
+And it is so necessary for her to succeed, poor child!"
+
+Chevalier did not feel disposed to lavish any pity upon Felicie. With a
+shrug of the shoulders he replied bluntly:
+
+"No need to worry about that. She'll get on. She is an actress heart and
+soul. She has it in her bones, down to her very legs."
+
+Madame Nanteuil indulged in a quiet smile.
+
+"Poor child! They are not very plump, her legs. Felicie's health is not
+bad, but she must not overdo it. She often has fits of giddiness, and
+sick headaches."
+
+The servant came in to place on the table a dish of fried sausage, a
+bottle of wine, and a few plates.
+
+Meanwhile, Chevalier was searching in his mind for some appropriate
+fashion of asking a question which had been on the tip of his tongue
+ever since he had set foot on the stairs. He wanted to know whether
+Felicie was still meeting Girmandel, whose name he never heard mentioned
+nowadays. We are given to conceiving desires which suit themselves to
+our condition. Now, in the misery of his existence, in the distress of
+his heart, he was full of an eager desire that Felicie, who loved him no
+longer, should love Girmandel, whom she loved but little, and he hoped
+with all his heart that Girmandel would keep her for him, would possess
+her wholly, and leave nothing of her for Robert de Ligny. The idea that
+the girl might be with Girmandel appeased his jealousy, and he dreaded
+to learn that she had broken with him.
+
+Of course he would never have allowed himself to question a mother as to
+her daughter's lovers. But it was permissible to speak of Girmandel to
+Madame Nanteuil, who saw nothing that was other than respectable in the
+relations of her household with the Government official, who was
+well-to-do, married, and the father of two charming daughters. To bring
+Girmandel's name into the conversation he had only to resort to a
+stratagem. Chevalier hit upon one which he thought was ingenious.
+
+"By the way," he remarked, "I saw Girmandel just now in a carriage."
+
+Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
+
+"He was driving down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in a cab. I certainly
+thought I recognized him. I should be greatly surprised if it wasn't
+he."
+
+Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
+
+"His fair beard, his high colour--he's an easy man to recognize,
+Girmandel."
+
+Madame Nanteuil made no comment.
+
+"You were very friendly with him at one time, you and Felicie. Do you
+still see him?"
+
+"Monsieur Girmandel? Oh yes, we still see him," replied Madame Nanteuil
+softly.
+
+These words made Chevalier feel almost happy. But she had deceived him;
+she had not spoken the truth. She had lied out of self-respect, and in
+order not to reveal a domestic secret which she regarded as derogatory
+to the honour of her family. The truth was that, being carried away by
+her passion for Ligny, Felicie had given Girmandel the go-by, and he,
+being a man of the world, had promptly cut off supplies. Madame
+Nanteuil, despite her years, had resumed an old lover, out of her love
+for her child, that she might not want for anything. She had renewed her
+former liaison with Tony Meyer, the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy.
+Tony Meyer was a poor substitute for Girmandel; he was none too free
+with his money. Madame Nanteuil, who was wise and knew the value of
+things, did not complain on that account, and she was rewarded for her
+devotion, for, in the six weeks during which she had been loved anew,
+she had grown young again.
+
+Chevalier, following up his idea, inquired:
+
+"You would hardly say that Girmandel was still a young man, would you?"
+
+"He is not old," said Madame Nanteuil. "A man is not old at forty."
+
+"A bit used up, isn't he?"
+
+"Oh, dear no," replied Madame Nanteuil, quite calmly.
+
+Chevalier became thoughtful and was silent. Madame Nanteuil began to
+nod. Then, being aroused from her somnolence by the servant, who brought
+in the salt-cellar and the water-bottle, she inquired:
+
+"And you, Monsieur Chevalier, is all well with you?"
+
+No, all was not well with him. The critics were out to "down" him. And
+the proof that they had combined against him was that they all said the
+same thing; they said his face lacked expression.
+
+"My face lacking in expression!" he cried indignantly. "They should have
+called it a predestined face. Madame Nanteuil, I aim high, and it is
+that which does me harm. For example, in _La Nuit du 23 octobre_, which
+is being rehearsed now, I am Florentin: I have only six lines; it's a
+washout. But I have increased the importance of the character
+enormously. Durville is furious. He deliberately crabs all my effects."
+
+Madame Nanteuil, placid and kindly, found words to comfort him.
+Obstacles there were, no doubt, but in the end one overcame them. Her
+own daughter had fallen foul of the ill-will of certain critics.
+
+"Half-past twelve!" said Chevalier gloomily. "Felicie is late."
+
+Madame Nanteuil supposed that she had been detained by Madame Doulce.
+
+"Madame Doulce as a rule undertakes to see her home, and you know she
+never hurries herself."
+
+Chevalier rose, as if to take his leave, to show that he remembered his
+manners. Madame Nanteuil begged him to stay.
+
+"Don't go; Felicie won't be long now. She will be pleased to find you
+here. You will have supper with her."
+
+Madame Nanteuil dozed off again in her chair. Chevalier sat gazing in
+silence at the clock hanging on the wall, and as the hand travelled
+across the dial he felt a burning wound in his heart, which grew bigger
+and bigger, and each little stroke of the pendulum touched him to the
+quick, lending a keener eye to his jealousy, by recording the moments
+which Felicie was passing with Ligny. For he was now convinced that they
+were together. The stillness of the night, interrupted only by the
+muffled sound of the cabs bowling along the boulevard, gave reality to
+the thoughts and images which tortured him. He could see them.
+
+Awakened with a start by the sound of singing on the pavement below,
+Madame Nanteuil returned to the thought with which she had fallen
+asleep.
+
+"That's what I am always telling Felicie; one mustn't be discouraged.
+One should not lose heart. We all have our ups and downs in life."
+
+Chevalier nodded acquiescence.
+
+"But those who suffer," he said, "only get what they deserve. It needs
+but a moment to free oneself from all one's troubles. Isn't it so?"
+
+She admitted the fact; certainly there were such things as sudden
+opportunities, especially on the stage.
+
+"Heaven knows," he continued in a deep, brooding voice, "it's not the
+stage I am worrying about. I know I shall make a name for myself one
+day, and a big one. But what's the good of being a great artist if one
+isn't happy? There are stupid worries which are terrible! Pains that
+throb in your temples with strokes as even and as regular as the ticking
+of that clock, till they drive you mad!"
+
+He ceased speaking; the gloomy gaze of his deep-set eyes fell upon the
+trophy hanging on the wall. Then he continued:
+
+"These stupid worries, these ridiculous sufferings, if one endures them
+too long, it simply means that one is a coward."
+
+And he felt the butt of the revolver which he always carried in his
+pocket.
+
+Madame Nanteuil listened to him serenely, with that gentle determination
+not to know anything, which had been her one talent in life.
+
+"Another dreadful thing," she observed, "is to decide what to have to
+eat. Felicie is sick of everything. There's no knowing what to get for
+her."
+
+After that, the flagging conversation languished, drawn out into
+detached phrases, which had no particular meaning. Madame Nanteuil, the
+servant, the coke fire, the lamp, the plate of sausage, awaited Felicie
+in depressing silence. The clock struck one. Chevalier's suffering had
+by this time attained the serenity of a flood tide. He was now certain.
+The cabs were not so frequent and their wheels echoed more loudly along
+the street. The rumbling of one of these cabs suddenly ceased outside the
+house. A few seconds later he heard the slight grating of a key in the
+lock, the slamming of the door, and light footsteps in the outer room.
+
+The clock marked twenty-three minutes past one. He was suddenly full of
+agitation, yet hopeful. She had come! Who could tell what she would say?
+She might offer the most natural explanation of her late arrival.
+
+Felicie entered the room, her hair in disorder, her eyes shining, her
+cheeks white, her bruised lips a vivid red; she was tired, indifferent,
+mute, happy and lovely, seeming to guard beneath her cloak, which she
+held wrapped about her with both hands, some remnant of warmth and
+voluptuous pleasure.
+
+"I was beginning to be worried," said her mother. "Aren't you going to
+unfasten your cloak?"
+
+"I'm hungry," she replied. She dropped into a chair before the little
+round table. Throwing her cloak over the back of the chair, she revealed
+her slender figure in its little black schoolgirl's dress, and, resting
+her left elbow on the oil-cloth table-cover, she proceeded to stick her
+fork into the sliced sausage.
+
+"Did everything go off well to-night?" asked Madame Nanteuil.
+
+"Quite well."
+
+"You see Chevalier has come to keep you company. It is kind of him,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, Chevalier! Well, let him come to the table."
+
+And, without replying further to her mother's questions, she began to
+eat, greedy and charming, like Ceres in the old woman's house. Then she
+pushed aside her plate, and leaning back in her chair, with half-closed
+eyes, and parted lips, she smiled a smile that was akin to a kiss.
+
+Madame Nanteuil, having drunk her glass of mulled wine, rose to her feet.
+
+"You will excuse me, Monsieur Chevalier, I have my accounts to bring up
+to date."
+
+This was the formula which she usually employed to announce that she was
+going to bed.
+
+Left alone with Felicie, Chevalier said to her angrily:
+
+"I know I'm a fool and a groveller; but I'm going mad for love of you.
+Do you hear, Felicie?"
+
+"I should think I do hear. You needn't shout like that!"
+
+"It's ridiculous, isn't it?"
+
+"No, it's not ridiculous, it's----"
+
+She did not complete the sentence.
+
+He drew nearer to her, dragging his chair with him.
+
+"You came in at twenty-five minutes past one. It was Ligny who saw you
+home, I know it. He brought you back in a cab, I heard it stop outside
+the house."
+
+As she did not reply, he continued:
+
+"Deny it, if you can!"
+
+She remained silent, and he repeated, in an urgent, almost appealing
+tone:
+
+"Tell me he didn't!"
+
+Had she been so inclined, she might, with a phrase, with a single word,
+with a tiny movement of head or shoulders, have rendered him perfectly
+submissive, and almost happy. But she maintained a malicious silence.
+With compressed lips and a far-off look in her eyes, she seemed as
+though lost in a dream.
+
+He sighed hoarsely.
+
+"Fool that I was, I didn't think of that! I told myself you would come
+home, as on other nights, with Madame Doulce, or else alone. If I had
+only known that you were going to let that fellow see you home!"
+
+"Well, what would you have done, had you known it?"
+
+"I should have followed you, by God!"
+
+She stared at him with hard, unnaturally bright eyes.
+
+"That I forbid you to do! Understand me! If I learn that you have
+followed me, even once, I'll never see you again. To begin with, you
+haven't the right to follow me. I suppose I am free to do as I like."
+
+Choking with astonishment and anger, he stammered:
+
+"Haven't the right to? Haven't the right to? You tell me I haven't the
+right?"
+
+"No, you haven't the right! Moreover, I won't have it." Her face assumed
+an expression of disgust. "It's a mean trick to spy on a woman, if you
+once try to find out where I'm going, I'll send you about your business,
+and quickly at that."
+
+"Then," he murmured, thunderstruck, "we are nothing to each other, I am
+nothing to you. We have never belonged to each other. But see, Felicie,
+remember----"
+
+But she was losing patience:
+
+"Well, what do you want me to remember?"
+
+"Felicie, remember that you gave yourself to me!"
+
+"My dear boy, you really can't expect me to think of that all day. It
+wouldn't be proper."
+
+He looked at her for a while, more in curiosity than in anger, and said
+to her, half bitterly, half gently:
+
+"They may well call you a selfish little jade! Be one, Felicie, be one,
+as much as you like! What does it matter, since I love you? You are
+mine; I am going to take you back; I am going to take you back, and keep
+you. Think! I can't go on suffering for ever, like a poor dumb beast.
+Listen. I'll start with a clean slate. Let us begin to love one another
+over again. And this time it will be all right. And you'll be mine for
+good, mine only. I am an honest man; you know that. You can depend on
+me. I'll marry you as soon as I've got a position."
+
+She gazed at him with disdainful surprise. He believed that she had
+doubts as to his dramatic future, and, in order to banish them, he said,
+erect on his long legs:
+
+"Don't you believe in my star, Felicie? You are wrong. I can feel that I
+am capable of creating great parts. Let them only give me a part, and
+they'll see. And I have in me not only comedy, but drama, tragedy--yes,
+tragedy. I can deliver verse properly. And that is a talent which is
+becoming rare in these days. So don't imagine, Felicie, that I am
+insulting you when I offer you marriage. Far from it! We will marry
+later on, as soon as it is possible and suitable. Of course, there is
+no need for hurry. Meanwhile, we will resume our pleasant habits of the
+Rue des Martyrs. You remember, Felicie; we were so happy there! The bed
+wasn't wide, but we used to say: "That doesn't matter." I have now two
+fine rooms in the Rue de la Montagne-Saint-Genevieve, behind
+Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. Your portrait hangs on every wall. You will find
+there the little bed of the Rue des Martyrs. Listen to me, I beg of you:
+I have suffered too much; I will not suffer any longer. I demand that
+you shall be mine, mine only."
+
+While he was speaking, Felicie had taken from the mantelpiece the pack
+of cards with which her mother played every night, and was spreading
+them out on the table.
+
+"Mine only. You hear me, Felicie."
+
+"Don't disturb me, I am busy with a game of patience."
+
+"Listen to me, Felicie. I won't have you receiving that fool in your
+dressing-room."
+
+Looking at her cards she murmured:
+
+"All the blacks are at the bottom of the pack."
+
+"I say that fool. He is a diplomatist, and nowadays the Ministry of
+Foreign Affairs is the refuge of incompetents." Raising his voice, he
+continued: "Felicie, for your own sake, as well as for mine, listen to
+me!"
+
+"Well, don't shout, then. Mama is asleep."
+
+He continued in muffled tones:
+
+"Just get it into your head that I don't intend that Ligny shall be your
+lover."
+
+She raised her spiteful little face, and replied:
+
+"And if he is my lover?"
+
+He moved a step closer to her, raising his chair, gazing at her with the
+eye of a madman, and laughing a cracked laugh.
+
+"If he is your lover, he won't be so for long."
+
+And he dropped the chair.
+
+Now she was alarmed. She forced herself to smile.
+
+"You know very well I'm joking!"
+
+She succeeded without much difficulty in making him believe that she had
+spoken thus merely to punish him, because he was getting unbearable. He
+became calmer. She then informed him that she was tired out, that she
+was dropping with sleep. At last he decided to go home. On the landing
+he turned, and said:
+
+"Felicie, I advise you, if you wish to avoid a tragedy, not to see Ligny
+again."
+
+She cried through the half-open door:
+
+"Knock on the window of the porter's lodge, so that he can let you
+out!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+In the dark auditorium large linen sheets protected the balcony and the
+boxes. The orchestra was covered with a huge dust-cloth, which, being
+turned back at the edges, left room for a few human figures,
+indistinctly seen in the gloom: actors, scene-shifters, costumiers,
+friends of the manager, mothers and lovers and actresses. Here and there
+shone a pair of eyes from the black recesses of the boxes.
+
+They were rehearsing, for the fifty-sixth time, _La Nuit du 23 octobre
+1812_, a celebrated drama, dating twenty years back, which had not as
+yet been performed in this theatre. The actors knew their parts, and the
+following day had been chosen for that last private rehearsal which on
+stages less austere than that of the Odeon is known as "the dressmakers'
+rehearsal."
+
+Nanteuil had no part in the play. But she had had business at the
+theatre that day, and, as she had been informed that Marie-Claire was
+execrable in the part of General Malet's wife, she had come to have a
+peep at her, concealed in the depths of a box.
+
+The great scene of the second act was about to begin. The stage setting
+represented an attic in the private asylum where the conspirator was
+confined in 1812. Durville, who filled the part of General Malet, had
+just made his entrance. He was rehearsing in costume: a long blue
+frock-coat, with a collar reaching above his ears, and riding-breeches
+of chamois leather. He had even gone so far as to make up his face for
+the part, the clean-shaven soldierly face of the general of the Empire,
+ornamented with the "hare's-foot" whiskers which were handed down by the
+victors of Austerlitz to their sons, the bourgeois of July. Standing
+erect, his right elbow resting in his left hand, his brow supported by
+his right hand, his deep voice and his tight-fitting breeches expressed
+his pride.
+
+"Alone, and without funds, from the depths of a prison, to attack this
+colossus, who commands a million soldiers, and who causes all the
+peoples and kings of Europe to tremble. Well, this colossus shall fall
+crashing to the ground."
+
+From the back of the stage old Maury, who was playing the conspirator
+Jacquemont, delivered his reply:
+
+"He may crush us in his downfall."
+
+Suddenly cries at once plaintive and angry arose from the orchestra.
+
+The author was exploding. He was a man of seventy, brimming over with
+youth.
+
+"What do I see there at the back of the stage? It's not an actor, it's a
+fire-place. We shall have to send for the bricklayers, the
+marble-workers, to move it. Maury, do get a move on, confound you!"
+
+Maury shifted his position.
+
+"He may crush us in his downfall. I realize that it will not be your
+fault, General. Your proclamation is excellent. You promise them a
+constitution, liberty, equality. It is Machiavellian."
+
+Durville replied:
+
+"And in the best sense. An incorrigible breed, they are making ready to
+violate the oaths that they have not yet taken, and, because they lie,
+they believe themselves Machiavellis. What will you do with absolute
+power, you simpletons?"
+
+The strident voice of the author ground out:
+
+"You are right off the track, Dauville."
+
+"I?" asked the astonished Durville.
+
+"Yes, you, Dauville, you do not understand a word of what you are
+saying."
+
+In order to humiliate them, "to take them down a peg," this man who, in
+the whole course of his life, had never forgotten the name of a
+dairy-woman or a hall-porter, disdained to remember the names of the
+most illustrious actors.
+
+"Dauville, my friend, just do that over again for me."
+
+He could play every part well. Jovial, funereal, violent, tender,
+impetuous, affectionate, he assumed at will a deep or a piping voice; he
+sighed, he roared, he laughed, he wept. He could transform himself, like
+the man in the fairy-tale, into a flame, a river, a woman, a tiger.
+
+In the wings the actors exchanged only short and meaningless phrases.
+Their freedom of speech, their easy morals, the familiarity of their
+manners did not prevent their retaining so much of hypocrisy as is
+needful, in any assemblage of men, if people are to look upon one
+another without feelings of horror and disgust. There even prevailed, in
+this workshop in full activity, a seemly appearance of harmony and
+union, a oneness of feeling created by the thought, lofty or
+commonplace, of the author, a spirit of order which compelled all
+rivalries and all illwill to transform themselves into goodwill and
+harmonious co-operation.
+
+Nanteuil, sitting in her box, felt uneasy at the thought that Chevalier
+was close at hand. For the last two days, since the night on which he
+had uttered his obscure threats, she had not seen him again and the fear
+with which he had inspired her still possessed her. "Felicie, if you
+wish to prevent a tragedy, I advise you not to see Ligny again." What
+did those words portend? She pondered deeply over Chevalier. This young
+fellow, who, only two days earlier, had seemed to her commonplace and
+insignificant, of whom she had seen a good deal too much, whom she knew
+by heart--how mysterious and full of secrets he now appeared to her! How
+suddenly it had dawned upon her that she did not know him! Of what was
+he capable? She tried to guess. What was he going to do? Probably
+nothing. All men who are thrown over by a woman utter threats and do
+nothing. But was Chevalier a man quite like all the rest? People did say
+that he was crazy. That was mere talk. But she herself did not feel sure
+that there might not be a spark of insanity in him. She was studying him
+now with genuine interest. Highly intelligent herself, she had never
+discovered any great signs of intelligence in him; but he had on several
+occasions astonished her by the obstinacy of his will. She could
+remember his performing acts of the fiercest energy. Jealous by nature,
+there were yet certain matters which he understood. He knew what a woman
+is compelled to do in order to win a place on the stage, or to dress
+herself properly; but he could not endure to be deceived for the sake of
+love. Was he the sort of man to commit a crime, to do something
+dreadful? That was what she could not decide. She recalled his mania for
+handling firearms. When she used to visit him in the Rue des Martyrs,
+she always found him in his room, taking an old shot-gun to pieces and
+cleaning it. And yet he never went shooting. He boasted of being a dead
+shot, and carried a revolver on his person. But what did that prove?
+Never before had she thought so much about him.
+
+Nanteuil was tormenting herself in this fashion in her box, when Jenny
+Fagette came to join her there; Jenny Fagette, slender and fragile, the
+incarnation of Alfred de Musset's Muse, who at night wore out her eyes
+of periwinkle-blue by scribbling society notes and fashion articles. A
+mediocre actress, but a clever and wonderfully energetic woman, she was
+Nanteuil's most intimate friend. They recognized in each other
+remarkable qualities, qualities which differed from those which each
+discovered in herself, and they acted in concert as the two great Powers
+of the Odeon. Nevertheless, Fagette was doing her best to take Ligny
+away from her friend; not from inclination, for she was insensible as a
+stick and held men in contempt, but with the idea that a liaison with a
+diplomatist would procure her certain advantages, and above all, in
+order not to miss the opportunity of doing something scandalous.
+Nanteuil was aware of this. She knew that all her sister-actresses,
+Ellen Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, were
+trying to take Ligny from her. She had seen Louise Dalle, who dressed
+like a music-mistress, and always had the air of being about to storm an
+omnibus, and retained, even in her provocations and accidental contacts,
+the appearance of incurable respectability, pursue Ligny with her lanky
+legs, and beset him with the glances of a poverty-stricken Pasiphae. She
+had also surprised the oldest actress of the theatre, their excellent
+mother Ravaud, in a corridor, baring, at Ligny's approach, all that was
+left to her, her magnificent arms, which had been famous for forty
+years.
+
+Fagette, with disgust, and the tip of a gloved finger, called Nanteuil's
+attention to the scene through which Durville, old Maury and
+Marie-Claire were struggling.
+
+"Just look at those people. They look as if they were playing at the
+bottom of thirty fathoms of water."
+
+"It's because the top lights are not lit."
+
+"Not a bit of it. This theatre always looks as if it were at the bottom
+of the sea. And to think that I, too, in a moment, have to enter that
+aquarium. Nanteuil, you must not stop longer than one season in this
+theatre. One is drowned in it. But look at them, look at them!"
+
+Durville was becoming almost ventriloqual in order to seem more solemn
+and more virile:
+
+"Peace, the abolition of the combined martial and civil law, and of
+conscription, higher pay for the troops; in the absence of funds, a few
+drafts on the bank, a few commissions suitably distributed, these are
+infallible means."
+
+Madame Doulce entered the box. Unfastening her cloak with its pathetic
+lining of old rabbit-skin, she produced a small dog's-eared book.
+
+"They are Madame de Sevigne's letters," she said. "You know that next
+Sunday I am going to give a reading of the best of Madame de Sevigne's
+letters."
+
+"Where?" asked Fagette.
+
+"Salle Renard."
+
+It must have been some remote and little known hall, for Nanteuil and
+Fagette had not heard of it.
+
+"I am giving this reading for the benefit of the three poor orphans left
+by Lacour, the actor, who died so sadly of consumption this winter. I am
+counting on you, my darlings, to dispose of some tickets for me."
+
+"All the same, she really is ridiculous, Marie-Claire!" said Nanteuil.
+
+Some one scratched at the door of the box. It was Constantin Marc, the
+youthful author of a play, _La Grille_, which the Odeon was going to
+rehearse immediately; and Constantin Marc, although a countryman living
+in the forest, could henceforth breathe only in the theatre. Nanteuil
+was to take the principal part in the play. He gazed upon her with
+emotion, as the precious amphora destined to be the receptacle of his
+thought.
+
+Meanwhile Durville continued hoarsely:
+
+"If our France can be saved only at the price of our life and honour, I
+shall say, with the man of '93: 'Perish our memory!'"
+
+Fagette pointed her finger at a bloated youth, who was sitting in the
+orchestra, resting his chin on his walking-stick.
+
+"Isn't that Baron Deutz?"
+
+"Need you ask!" replied Nanteuil. "Ellen Midi is in the cast. She plays
+in the fourth act. Baron Deutz has come to display himself."
+
+"Just wait a minute, my children; I have a word to say to that
+ill-mannered cub. He met me yesterday in the Place de la Concorde, and
+he didn't bow to me."
+
+"What, Baron Deutz? He couldn't have seen you!"
+
+"He saw me perfectly well. But he was with his people. I am going to
+have him on toast. Just you watch, my dears."
+
+She called him very softly:
+
+"Deutz! Deutz!"
+
+The Baron came towards her, smiling and well-pleased with himself, and
+leaned his elbows on the edge of the box.
+
+"Tell me, Monsieur Deutz, when you met me yesterday, were you in very
+bad company that you did not raise your hat to me?"
+
+He looked at her in astonishment.
+
+"I? I was with my sister."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+On the stage, Marie-Claire, hanging upon Durville's neck, was
+exclaiming:
+
+"Go! Victorious or defeated, in good or evil fortune, your glory will be
+equally great. Come what may, I shall know how to show myself the wife
+of a hero."
+
+"That will do, Madame Marie-Claire!" said Pradel.
+
+Just at that moment Chevalier made his entry, and immediately the
+author, tearing his hair, let loose a flood of imprecations:
+
+"Do you call that an entry? It's a tumble, a catastrophe, a cataclysm!
+Ye gods! A meteor, an aerolith, a bit of the moon falling on to the
+stage would be less horribly disastrous! I will take off my play!
+Chevalier, come in again, my good fellow!"
+
+The artist who had designed the costumes, Michel, a fair young man with
+a mystic's beard, was seated in the first row, on the arm of a stall. He
+leaned over and whispered into the ear of Roger, the scene-painter:
+
+"And to think it's the fifty-sixth time that he's dropped on Chevalier
+with the same fury!"
+
+"Well, you know, Chevalier is rottenly bad," replied Roger, without
+hesitation.
+
+"It isn't that he is bad," returned Michel indulgently. "But he always
+seems to be laughing, and nothing could be worse for a comedy actor. I
+knew him when he was quite a kid, at Montmartre. At school his masters
+used to ask him: 'Why are you laughing?' He was not laughing; he had no
+desire to laugh; he used to get his ears boxed from morning to night.
+His parents wanted to put him in a chemical factory. But he had dreams
+of the stage, and spent his days on the Butte Montmartre, in the studio
+of the painter Montalent. Montalent at that time was working day and
+night on his _Death of Saint Louis_, a huge picture which was
+commissioned for the cathedral of Carthage. One day, Montalent said to
+him----"
+
+"A little less noise!" shouted Pradel.
+
+"Said to him: 'Chevalier, since you have nothing to do, just sit for
+Philippe the Bold.' 'With pleasure,' said Chevalier. Montalent told him
+to assume the attitude of a man bowed down with grief. More, he stuck
+two tears as big as spectacle lenses on his cheeks. He finished his
+picture, forwarded it to Carthage, and had half a dozen bottles of
+champagne sent up. Three months later he received from Father Cornemuse,
+the head of the French Missions in Tunis, a letter informing him that
+his painting of the _Death of Saint Louis_, having been submitted to the
+Cardinal-Archbishop, had been refused by His Eminence, because of the
+unseemly expression on the face of Philippe the Bold who was laughing as
+he watched the saintly King, his father, dying on a bed of straw.
+Montalent could not make head or tail of it; he was furious, and wanted
+to take proceedings against the Cardinal-Archbishop. His painting was
+returned to him; he unpacked it, gazed at it in gloomy silence, and
+suddenly shouted: 'It's true--Philippe the Bold appears to be splitting
+his sides with laughter. What a fool I have been! I gave him the head of
+Chevalier, who always seems to be laughing, the brute!'"
+
+"Will you be quiet there!" yelled Pradel.
+
+And the author exclaimed:
+
+"Pradel, my dear boy, just pitch all those people into the street."
+
+Indefatigable, he was arranging the scene:
+
+"A little farther, Trouville, there. Chevalier, you walk up to the
+table, you pick up the documents one by one, and you say:
+'Senatus-Consultum. Order of the day. Despatches to the departments.
+Proclamation,' Do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, Master. 'Senatus-Consultum. Order of the day. Despatches to the
+departments. Proclamation.'"
+
+"Now, Marie-Claire, my child, a little more life, confound it! Cross
+over! That's it! Very good. Back again! Good! Very good! Buck up! Ah,
+the wretched woman! She's spoiling it all!"
+
+He called the stage manager.
+
+"Romilly, give us a little more light, one can't see an inch. Dauville,
+my dear friend, what are you doing there in front of the prompter's box!
+You seem glued to it! Just get into your head, once for all, that you
+are not the statue of General Malet, that you are General Malet in
+person, that my play is not a catalogue of wax-work figures, but a
+living moving tragedy, one which brings the tears into your eyes, and----"
+
+Words failed him, and he sobbed for a long while into his handkerchief.
+Then he roared:
+
+"Holy thunder! Pradel! Romilly! Where is Romilly? Ah, there he is, the
+villain! Romilly, I told you to put the stove nearer the dormer-window.
+You have not done so. What are you thinking of, my friend?"
+
+The rehearsal was suddenly brought to a standstill by a serious
+difficulty. Chevalier, the bearer of documents on which hung the fate of
+the Empire, was to escape from his prison by the dormer-window. The
+stage "business" had not yet been settled; it had been impossible to do
+so before the setting of the stage was completed. It was now discovered
+that the measurements had been wrongly taken, and the dormer-window was
+not accessible.
+
+The author leapt on to the stage.
+
+"Romilly, my friend, the stove is not in the place fixed on. How can you
+expect Chevalier to get out through the dormer-window? Push the stove to
+the right at once."
+
+"I'm willing enough," said Romilly, "but we shall be blocking up the
+door."
+
+"What's that? We shall be blocking up the door?"
+
+"Precisely."
+
+The manager of the theatre, the stage-manager, the scene-shifters stood
+examining the stage-setting with gloomy attention, while the author held
+his peace.
+
+"Don't worry, Master," said Chevalier. "There's no need to change
+anything. I shall be able to jump out all right."
+
+Climbing on to the stove, he did indeed succeed in grasping the sill of
+the window, and in hoisting himself up until his elbows rested on it, a
+feat that had seemed impossible.
+
+A murmur of admiration rose from the stage, the wings, and the house.
+Chevalier had produced an astonishing impression by his strength and
+agility.
+
+"Splendid!" exclaimed the author. "Chevalier, my friend, that is
+perfect. The fellow is as nimble as a monkey. I'll be hanged if any of
+you could do as much. If all the parts were in such good hands as that
+of Florentin, the play would be lauded to the skies."
+
+Nanteuil, in her box, almost admired him. For one brief second he had
+seemed to her more than man, both man and gorilla, and the fear with
+which he had inspired her was immeasurably increased. She did not love
+him; she had never loved him; she did not desire him; it was a long time
+since she had really wanted him; and, for some days past, she had been
+unable to imagine herself taking pleasure in any other than Ligny; but
+had she at that moment found herself alone with Chevalier she would have
+felt powerless, and she would have sought to appease him by her
+submission as one appeases a supernatural power.
+
+On the stage, while an Empire _salon_ was being lowered from the flies,
+through all the noise of the running gear and the grounding of the
+supports, the author held the whole of the company, as well as all the
+supers, in the hollow of his hand, and at the same time gave them all
+advice, or illustrated what he wanted of them.
+
+"You, the big woman, the cake-seller, Madame Ravaud, haven't you ever
+heard the women calling in the Champs-Elysees: 'Eat your fill, ladies!
+This way for a treat!' It is _sung_. Just learn the tune by to-morrow.
+And you, drummer-boy, just give me your drum; I'm going to teach you how
+to beat the roll, confound it! Fagette, my child, what the mischief are
+you doing at a ball given by the Minister of Police, if you haven't any
+stockings with golden clocks? Take off those knitted woollen stockings
+immediately. This is the very last play that I shall produce in this
+theatre. Where is the colonel of the 10th cohort? So it's you? Well
+then, my friend, your soldiers march past like so many pigs. Madame
+Marie-Claire, come forward a little, so that I may teach you how to
+curtsy."
+
+He had a hundred eyes, a hundred mouths, and arms and legs everywhere.
+
+In the house, Romilly was shaking hands with Monsieur Gombaut, of the
+Academy of Moral Sciences, who had dropped in as a neighbour.
+
+"You may say what you will, Monsieur Gombaut, it is perhaps not accurate
+as far as facts are concerned, but it's drama."
+
+"Malet's conspiracy," replied Monsieur Gombaut, "remains, and will
+doubtless remain for a long time to come, an historical enigma. The
+author of this drama has taken advantage of those points which are
+obscure in order to introduce dramatic elements. But what, to my
+thinking, is beyond a doubt, is that General Malet, although associated
+with Royalists, was himself a Republican, and was working for the
+re-establishment of popular Government. In the course of his examination
+during the trial, he pronounced a sublime and profound utterance. When
+the presiding judge of the court-martial asked him: 'Who were your
+accomplices?' Malet replied: 'All France, and you yourself, had I
+succeeded.'"
+
+Leaning on the edge of Nanteuil's box, an aged sculptor, as venerable
+and as handsome as an ancient satyr, was gazing with glistening eye and
+smiling lips at the stage, which at that moment was in a state of
+commotion and confusion.
+
+"Are you pleased with the play, Master?" Nanteuil asked him.
+
+And the Master, who had no eyes for anything but bones, tendons and
+muscles, replied:
+
+"Yes, indeed, mademoiselle; yes, indeed! I see over there a little
+creature, little Midi, whose shoulder attachment is a jewel."
+
+He outlined it with his thumb. Tears welled up into his eyes.
+
+Chevalier asked if he might enter the box. He was happy, less on account
+of his prodigious success than at seeing Felicie. He dreamed, in his
+infatuation, that she had come for his sake, that she loved him, that
+she was returning to him.
+
+She feared him, and, as she was timid, she flattered him.
+
+"I congratulate you, Chevalier. You were simply astounding. Your exit is
+a marvel. You can take my word for it. I am not the only one to say so.
+Fagette thought you were wonderful."
+
+"Really?" asked Chevalier.
+
+It was one of the happiest moments of his life.
+
+A shrieking voice issued from the deserted heights of the third
+galleries, sounding through the house like the whistle of a locomotive.
+
+"One can't hear a word you say, my children; speak louder and pronounce
+your words distinctly!"
+
+The author appeared, infinitely small, in the shadow of the dome.
+
+Thereupon the utterance of the players who were collected at the front
+of the stage, around a naphtha flare, rose more distinctly:
+
+"The Emperor will allow the troops to rest for some weeks at Moscow;
+then with the rapidity of an eagle he will swoop down upon St.
+Petersburg."
+
+"Spades, clubs, trump, two points to me."
+
+"There we shall spend the winter, and next spring we shall penetrate
+into India, crossing Persia, and the British power will be a thing of
+the past."
+
+"Thirty-six in diamonds."
+
+"And I the four aces."
+
+"By the way, gentlemen, what say you to the Imperial decree concerning
+the actors of Paris, dated from the Kremlin? There's an end of the
+squabbles between Mademoiselle Mars and Mademoiselle Leverd."
+
+"Do look at Fagette," said Nanteuil. "She is charming in that blue
+Marie-Louise dress trimmed with chinchilla."
+
+Madame Doulce brought out from under her furs a stack of tickets already
+soiled through having been too frequently offered.
+
+"Master," she said, addressing Constantin Marc, "you know that next
+Sunday I am to give a reading, with appropriate remarks, of the best
+letters of Madame de Sevigne, for the benefit of the three poor orphans
+left by Lacour, the actors who died this winter in so deplorable a
+fashion."
+
+"Had he any talent?" asked Constantin Marc.
+
+"None whatever," said Nanteuil.
+
+"Well, then, in what way is his death deplorable?"
+
+"Oh, Master," sighed Madame Doulce, "do not pretend to be unfeeling."
+
+"I am not pretending to be unfeeling. But here is something that
+surprises me: the value which we set upon the lives of those who are not
+of the slightest interest to us. We seem as though we believe that life
+is in itself something precious. Yet nature teaches us plainly enough
+that nothing is more worthless and contemptible. In former days people
+were less besmeared with sentimentalism. Each of us held his own life to
+be infinitely precious, but he did not profess any respect whatever for
+the life of others. We were nearer to nature in those days. We were
+created to devour one another. But our debilitated, enervated,
+hypocritical race wallows in a sly cannibalism. While we are gulping one
+another down we declare that life is sacred, and we no longer dare to
+confess that life is murder."
+
+"That life is murder," echoed Chevalier dreamily, without grasping the
+meaning of the words.
+
+Then he poured forth a string of nebulous ideas:
+
+"Murder and bloodshed, that may be! But amusing bloodshed, and comical
+murder. Life is a burlesque catastrophe, a terrible comedy, the mask of
+carnival over blood-stained cheeks. That is what life means to the
+artist; the artist on the stage, and the artist in action."
+
+Nanteuil uneasily sought a meaning in these confused phrases.
+
+The actor continued excitedly:
+
+"Life is yet another thing: it is the flower and the knife, it is to see
+red one day and blue the next, it is hatred and love, ravishing,
+delightful hatred, cruel love."
+
+"Monsieur Chevalier," asked Constantin Marc in the quietest of tones,
+"does it not seem to you natural to be a murderer, and do you not think
+that it is merely the fear of being killed that prevents us from
+killing?"
+
+Chevalier replied in deep, pensive tones:
+
+"Most certainly not! It would not be the fear of being killed that would
+prevent me from killing. I have no fear of death. But I feel a respect
+for the life of others. I am humane in spite of myself. I have for some
+time past been seriously considering the question which you have just
+asked me, Monsieur Constantin Marc. I have pondered over it day and
+night, and I know now that I could not kill any one.'"
+
+At this, Nanteuil, filled with joy, cast upon him a look of contempt.
+She feared him no longer, and she could not forgive him for having
+alarmed her.
+
+She rose.
+
+"Good evening; I have a headache. Good-bye till to-morrow, Monsieur
+Constantin Marc." And she went out briskly.
+
+Chevalier ran after her down the corridor, descended the stage staircase
+behind her, and rejoined her by the stage doorkeeper's box.
+
+"Felicie, come and dine with me to-night at our cabaret. I should be so
+glad if you would! Will you?"
+
+"Good gracious, no!"
+
+"Why won't you?"
+
+"Leave me alone; you are bothering me!"
+
+She tried to escape. He detained her.
+
+"I love you so! Don't be too cruel to me!"
+
+Taking a step towards him, her lips curling back from her clenched
+teeth, she hissed into his ear:
+
+"It's all over, over, over! You hear me? I am fed up with you."
+
+Then, very gently and solemnly, he said:
+
+"It is the last time that we two shall speak together. Listen, Felicie,
+before there is a tragedy I ought to warn you. I cannot compel you to
+love me. But I do not intend that you shall love another. For the last
+time I advise you not to see Monsieur de Ligny again, I shall prevent
+your belonging to him."
+
+"You will prevent me? You? My poor dear fellow!"
+
+In a still more gentle tone he replied:
+
+"I mean it; I shall do it. A man can get what he wants; only he must pay
+the price."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Returning home, Felicie succumbed to a fit of tears. She saw Chevalier
+once more imploring her in a despairing voice with the look of a poor
+man. She had heard that voice and seen that expression when passing
+tramps, worn out with fatigue, on the high road, when her mother fearing
+that her lungs were affected, had taken her to spend the winter at
+Antibes with a wealthy aunt. She despised Chevalier for his gentleness
+and tranquil manner. But the recollection of that face and that voice
+disturbed her. She could not eat, she felt as if she were suffocating.
+In the evening she was attacked by such an excruciating internal pain
+that she thought she must be dying. She thought this feeling of
+prostration was due to the fact that it was two days since she had seen
+Robert. It was only nine o'clock. She hoped that she might find him
+still at home, and put on her hat.
+
+"Mamma, I have to go to the theatre this evening. I am off."
+
+Out of consideration for her mother, she was in the habit of making such
+veiled explanations.
+
+"Go, my child, but don't come home too late."
+
+Ligny lived with his parents. He had, on the top floor of the charming
+house in the Rue Vernet, a small bachelor flat, lit by round windows,
+which he called his "oeil-de-boeuf." Felicie sent word by the
+hall-porter that a lady was waiting for him in a carriage. Ligny did not
+care for women to look him up too often in the bosom of his family. His
+father, who was in the diplomatic service, and deeply engrossed in the
+foreign interests of the country, remained in an incredible state of
+ignorance as to what went on in his own house. But Madame de Ligny was
+determined that the decencies of life should be observed in her home,
+and her son was careful to satisfy her requirements in the matter of
+outward appearances, since they never probed to the bottom of things.
+She left him perfectly free to love where he would, and only rarely, in
+serious and expansive moments, did she hint that it was to the advantage
+of young men to cultivate the acquaintance of women of their own class.
+Hence it was that Robert had always dissuaded Felicie from coming to him
+in the Rue Vernet. He had rented, in the Boulevard de Villiers, a small
+house, where they could meet in absolute freedom. But on the present
+occasion, after two days without seeing her, he was greatly pleased by
+her unexpected visit, and he came down immediately.
+
+Leaning back in the cab, they drove through the darkness and the snow,
+at the quiet pace of their aged hack, through the streets and
+boulevards, while the darkness of the night cloaked their love-making.
+
+At her door, having seen her home, he said:
+
+"Good-bye till to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow, Boulevard de Villiers. Come early."
+
+She was leaning on him preparatory to stepping down from the cab.
+Suddenly she started back.
+
+"There! There! Among the trees. He has seen us. He was watching us."
+
+"Who, then?"
+
+"A man--some one I don't know."
+
+She had just recognized Chevalier. She stepped out, rang the bell, and,
+nestling in Robert's fur coat, waited, trembling, for the door to open.
+When it was opened, she detained him.
+
+"Robert, see me upstairs, I am frightened."
+
+Not without some impatience, he followed her up the stairs.
+
+Chevalier had waited for Felicie, in the little dining-room, before the
+armour which she had worn as Jeanne d'Arc, together with Madame
+Nanteuil, until one o'clock in the morning. He had left at that hour,
+and had watched for her on the pavement, and on seeing the cab stop in
+front of the door he had concealed himself behind a tree. He knew very
+well that she would return with Ligny; but when he saw them together it
+was as if the earth had yawned beneath him, and, so that he should not
+fall to the ground, he had clutched the trunk of the tree. He remained
+until Ligny had emerged from the house; he watched him as, wrapped in
+his fur coat, he got into the cab, took a couple of steps as if to
+spring on him, stopped short, and then with long strides went down the
+boulevard.
+
+He went his way, driven by the rain and wind. Feeling too hot, he doffed
+his felt hat, and derived a certain pleasure from the sense of the icy
+drops of water on his forehead. He was vaguely conscious that houses,
+trees, walls, and lights went past him indefinitely; he wandered on,
+dreaming.
+
+He found himself, without knowing how he had got there, on a bridge
+which he hardly knew. Half-way across it stood the colossal statue of a
+woman. His mind was now at rest; he had formed a resolution. It was an
+old idea, which he had now driven into his brain like a nail, which
+pierced it through and through. He no longer examined it. He calculated
+coldly the means of carrying out the thing he had determined to do. He
+walked straight ahead at random, absorbed in thought, and as calm as a
+mathematician.
+
+On the Pont des Arts he became aware that a dog was following him. He
+was a big, long-haired farm dog, with eyes of different colours, which
+were full of gentleness, and an expression of infinite distress.
+Chevalier spoke to him:
+
+"You've no collar. You are not happy. Poor fellow, I can't do anything
+for you."
+
+By four o'clock in the morning he found himself in the Avenue de
+l'Observatoire. On seeing the houses of the Boulevard Saint-Michel he
+experienced a painful impression and abruptly turned back toward the
+Observatory. The dog had vanished. Near the monument of the Lion of
+Belfort, Chevalier stopped in front of a deep trench which cut the road
+in two. Against the bank of excavated earth, under a tarpaulin supported
+by four stakes, an old man was keeping vigil before a brazier. The
+lappets of his rabbit-skin cap were down over his ears; his huge nose
+was a flaming red. He raised his head; his eyes, which were watering,
+seemed wholly white, without pupils, each set in a ring of fire and
+tears. He was stuffing into the bowl of his cutty a few scraps of
+canteen tobacco, mixed with bread-crumbs, which did not fill half the
+bowl of his little pipe.
+
+"Will you have some tobacco, old fellow?" asked Chevalier, offering him
+his pouch.
+
+The man's answer was slow in coming. His understanding was not quick,
+and courtesies astonished him. Finally, he opened a mouth which was
+quite black, and said:
+
+"I won't say no to that."
+
+He half rose from his seat. One of his feet was shod in an old slipper;
+the other was swathed in rags. Slowly, with hands numb with the cold, he
+stuffed his pipe. It was snowing, a snow that melted as it fell.
+
+"You will excuse me?" said Chevalier, and he slipped under the tarpaulin
+and seated himself beside the old man.
+
+From time to time they exchanged a remark.
+
+"Rotten weather!"
+
+"It's what we expect at this season. Winter's hard; summer's better."
+
+"So you look after the job at night, old fellow?"
+
+The old man answered readily when questioned. Before he spoke his throat
+emitted a long, very gentle murmur.
+
+"I do one thing one day; another thing another. Odd jobs. See?"
+
+"You are not a Parisian?"
+
+"No, I was born in La Creuse. I used to work as a navvy in the Vosges.
+I left there the year the Prussians and other foreigners came. There
+were thousands of them. Can't understand where they all came from. Maybe
+you've heard of the war of the Prussians, young man?"
+
+He remained silent for a long spell and then resumed:
+
+"So you are out on a spree, my lad. You don't feel like going back to
+the works yet?"
+
+"I am an actor," replied Chevalier.
+
+The old man who did not understand, inquired:
+
+"Where is it, your works?"
+
+Chevalier was anxious to rouse the old man's admiration.
+
+"I play comedy parts in a big theatre," he said. "I am one of the
+principal actors at the Odeon. You know the Odeon?"
+
+The watchman shook his head. No, he did not know the Odeon. After a
+prolonged silence, he once more opened the black cavern of his mouth:
+
+"And so, young man, you are on the loose. You don't want to go back to
+the works, eh?"
+
+Chevalier replied:
+
+"Read the paper the day after to-morrow, you will see my name in it."
+
+The old man tried to discover a meaning in these words, but it was too
+difficult; he gave it up, and reverted to his familiar train of thought.
+
+"When once one's off on the loose, it is sometimes for weeks and
+months."
+
+At daybreak, Chevalier resumed his wanderings. The sky was milky. Heavy
+wheels were breaking the silence of the paved roads. Voices, here and
+there, rang through the keen air. The snow was no longer falling. He
+walked on at haphazard. The spectacle of the city's reviving life made
+him feel almost cheerful. On the Pont des Arts he stood for a long time
+watching the Seine flow by, after which he continued on his way. On the
+Place du Havre he saw an open cafe. A faint streak of dawn was reddening
+the front windows. The waiters were sanding the brick pavement and
+setting out the tables. He flung himself into a chair.
+
+"Waiter, an absinthe."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+In the cab, beyond the fortifications, which were skirted by the
+deserted boulevard, Felicie and Robert held one another in a close
+embrace.
+
+"Don't you love your own Felicie? Tell me! Doesn't it flatter your
+vanity to possess a little woman who makes people cheer and clap her,
+who is written about in the newspapers? Mamma pastes all my notices in
+her album. The album is full already."
+
+He replied that he had not waited for her to succeed before discovering
+how charming she was; and, in fact, their liaison had begun when she was
+making an obscure first appearance at the Odeon in a revival which had
+fallen flat.
+
+"When you told me that you wanted me, I didn't keep you waiting, did I?
+We didn't take long about that! Wasn't I right? You are too sensible to
+think badly of me because I didn't keep things dragging along. When I
+saw you for the first time I felt that I was to be yours, so it wasn't
+worth while delaying. I don't regret it. Do you?"
+
+The cab stopped at a short distance from the fortifications, in front
+of a garden railing.
+
+This railing, which had not been painted for a long time, stood on a
+wall faced with pebbles, low and broad enough to permit of children
+perching themselves on it. It was screened half-way up by a sheet of
+iron with a toothed edge, and its rusty spikes did not rise more than
+ten feet above the ground. In the centre, between two pillars of masonry
+surmounted by cast-iron vases, the railing formed a gate opening in the
+middle, filled in across its lower part, and furnished, on the inside,
+with worm-eaten slatted shutters.
+
+They alighted from the cab. The trees of the boulevard, in four straight
+lines, lifted their frail skeletons in the fog. They heard, through the
+wide silence, the diminishing rattle of their cab, on its way back to
+the barrier, and the trotting of a horse coming from Paris.
+
+"How dismal the country is!" she said, with a shiver.
+
+"But, my darling, the Boulevard de Villiers is not the country."
+
+He could not open the gate, and the lock creaked. Irritated by the
+sound, she said:
+
+"Open it, do: the noise is getting on my nerves."
+
+She noticed that the cab which had come from Paris had stopped near
+their house, at about the tenth tree from where she stood; she looked at
+the thin, steaming horse and the shabby driver, and asked:
+
+"What is that carriage?"
+
+"It's a cab, my pet."
+
+"Why does it stop here?"
+
+"It has not stopped here? It's stopping in front of the next house."
+
+"There is no next house; there's only a vacant lot."
+
+"Well, then, it has stopped in front of a vacant lot. What more can I
+tell you?"
+
+"I don't see anyone getting out of it."
+
+"The driver is perhaps waiting for a fare."
+
+"What, in front of a vacant lot!"
+
+"Probably, my dear. This lock has got rusty."
+
+She crept along, hiding herself behind the trees, toward the spot where
+the cab had stopped, and then returned to Ligny, who had succeeded in
+unlocking the gate.
+
+"Robert, the blinds of the cab are down."
+
+"Well, then, there's a loving couple inside."
+
+"Don't you think there's something queer about that cab?"
+
+"It is not a thing of beauty, but all cabs are ugly. Come in."
+
+"Isn't somebody following us?"
+
+"Whom do you expect to follow us?"
+
+"I don't know. One of your women friends."
+
+But she was not saying what was in her thoughts.
+
+"Do come in, my darling."
+
+When she had entered the garden she said:
+
+"Be sure to close the gate properly, Robert."
+
+Before them stretched a small oval grass-plot.
+
+Behind it stood the house, with its flight of three steps, sheltered by
+a zinc portico, its six windows, and its slate roof.
+
+Ligny had rented it for a year from an old merchant's clerk, who had
+wearied of it because nocturnal prowlers used to steal his fowls and
+rabbits. On either side of the grass-plot a gravel path led to the
+steps. They took the path on the right. The gravel creaked beneath their
+feet.
+
+"Madame Simonneau has forgotten to close the shutters again," said
+Ligny.
+
+Madame Simonneau was a woman from Neuilly, who came every morning to
+clean up.
+
+A large Judas-tree, leaning to one side, and to all appearance dead,
+stretched one of its round black branches as far as the portico.
+
+"I don't quite like that tree," said Felicie; "its branches are like
+great snakes. One of them goes almost into our room."
+
+They went up the three front steps; and, while he was looking through
+his bunch of keys for the key of the front door, she rested her head on
+his shoulder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Felicie, when unveiling her beauty, displayed a serene pride which made
+her adorable. She revealed such a quiet satisfaction in her nudity that
+her chemise, when it fell to her feet, made the onlooker think of a
+white peacock.
+
+And when Robert saw her in her nakedness, bright as the streams or
+stars, he said:
+
+"At least you don't make one badger you! Its curious: there are women,
+who, even if you don't ask them for anything, surrender themselves
+completely, go just as far as it's possible to go, yet all the time they
+won't let you see so much as a finger-breadth of skin."
+
+"Why?" asked Felicie, playing with the airy threads of her hair.
+
+Robert de Ligny had experience of women. Yet he did not realize what an
+insidious question this was. He had received some training in moral
+science, and in replying he derived inspiration from the professors
+whose classes he had attended.
+
+"It is doubtless a matter of training, religious principles, and an
+innate feeling which survives even when----"
+
+This was not at all what he ought to have replied, for Felicie,
+shrugging her shoulders, and placing her hands upon her smoothly
+polished hips, interrupted him sharply:
+
+"Well, you are simple! It's because they've got bad figures! Training!
+Religion! It makes me boil to hear such rubbish! Have I been brought up
+any worse than other women? Have I less religion than they have? Tell
+me, Robert, how many really well-made women have you ever seen? Just
+reckon them up on your fingers. Yes, there are heaps of women who won't
+show their shoulders or anything. Take Fagette; she won't let even women
+see her undress; when she puts a clean chemise on she holds the old one
+between her teeth. Sure enough, I should do the same if I were built as
+she is!"
+
+She relapsed into silence, and, with quiet arrogance, slowly ran the
+palms of her hands over her sides and her loins, observing proudly:
+
+"And the best of it is that there's not too much of me anywhere."
+
+She was conscious of the charm imparted to her beauty by the graceful
+slenderness of her outlines.
+
+Now her head, thrown back on the pillow, was bathed in the masses of her
+golden tresses, which lay streaming in all directions; her slender body,
+slightly raised by a pillow slipped beneath her loins, lay motionless at
+full length; one gleaming leg was extended along the edge of the bed,
+ending in a sharply chiselled foot like the point of a sword. The light
+from the great fire which had been lit in the fireplace gilded her
+flesh, casting palpitating lights and shadows over her motionless body,
+clothing it in mystery and splendour, while her outer clothing and her
+underlinen, lying on the chairs and the carpet, waited, like a docile
+flock.
+
+She raised herself on her elbow, resting her cheek in her hand.
+
+"You are the first, really you are, I am not lying: the others don't
+exist."
+
+He felt no jealousy in respect of the past; he had no fear of
+comparisons. He questioned her:
+
+"Then the others?"
+
+"To begin with, there were only two: my professor, and he of course
+doesn't count, and there was the man I told you about, a solid sort of a
+person, whom my mother saddled me with."
+
+"No more?"
+
+"I swear it."
+
+"And Chevalier?"
+
+"Chevalier? He? Good gracious, no! You wouldn't have had me look at
+him!"
+
+"And the solid sort of person found by your mother, he, too, does not
+count any more?"
+
+"I assure you that, with you, I am another woman. It's the solemn truth
+that you are the first to possess me. It's queer, all the same.
+Directly I set eyes on you I wanted you. Quite suddenly I felt I must
+have you. I felt it somehow. What? I should find it very hard to say.
+Oh, I didn't stop to think. With your conventional, stiff, frigid
+manners, and your appearance, like a curly-haired little wolf, you
+pleased me, that was all! And now I could not do without you. No,
+indeed, I couldn't."
+
+He assured her that on her surrender he had been deliciously surprised;
+he said all sorts of pretty, caressing things, all of which had been
+said before.
+
+Taking his head in her hands, she said:
+
+"You have really the teeth of a wolf. I think it was your teeth that
+made me want you the first day. Bite me!"
+
+He pressed her to his bosom, and felt her firm supple body respond to
+his embrace. Suddenly she released herself:
+
+"Don't you hear the gravel creaking?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Listen: I can hear a sound of footsteps on the path."
+
+Sitting upright, her body bent forward, she strained her ears.
+
+He was disappointed, excited, irritated, and perhaps his self-esteem was
+slightly hurt.
+
+"What has come over you? It's absurd."
+
+She cried very sharply:
+
+"Do hold your tongue!"
+
+She was listening intently to a slight sound, near at hand, as of
+breaking branches.
+
+Suddenly she leapt from the bed with such instinctive agility, with a
+movement so like the rapid spring of a young animal, that Ligny,
+although by no means of a literary turn of mind, thought of the cat
+metamorphosed into a woman.
+
+"Are you crazy? Where are you going?"
+
+Raising a corner of the curtain, she wiped the moisture from the corner
+of a pane, and peered out through the window. She saw nothing but the
+night. The noise had ceased altogether.
+
+During this time, Ligny, lying moodily against the wall, was grumbling:
+
+"As you will, but, if you catch a cold, so much the worse for you!"
+
+She glided back into bed. At first he remained somewhat resentful; but
+she wrapped him about with the delicious freshness of her body.
+
+When they came to themselves they were surprised to see by one of their
+watches that it was seven o'clock.
+
+Ligny lit the lamp, a paraffin lamp, supported on a column, with a
+cut-glass container inside which the wick was curled up like a
+tape-worm. Felicie was very quick in dressing herself. They had to
+descend one floor by a wooden staircase, dark and narrow. He went ahead,
+carrying the lamp, and halted in the passage.
+
+"You go out, darling, before I put the lamp out."
+
+She opened the door, and immediately recoiled with a loud shriek. She
+had seen Chevalier standing on the outer steps, with arms extended,
+tall, black, erect as a crucifix. His hand grasped a revolver. The glint
+of the weapon was not perceptible; nevertheless she saw it quite
+distinctly.
+
+"What's the matter?" demanded Ligny, who was turning down the wick of
+the lamp.
+
+"Listen, but don't come near me!" cried Chevalier in a loud voice. "I
+forbid you to belong to one another. This is my dying wish. Good-bye,
+Felicie."
+
+And he slipped the barrel of the revolver into his mouth.
+
+Crouching against the passage wall, she closed her eyes. When she
+reopened them, Chevalier was lying on his side, across the doorway. His
+eyes were wide open, and he seemed to be gazing at them with a smile. A
+thread of blood was trickling from his mouth over the flagstones of the
+porch. A convulsive tremor shook his arm. Then he ceased to move. As he
+lay there, huddled up; he seemed smaller than usual.
+
+On hearing the report of the revolver, Ligny had hurriedly come forward.
+In the darkness of the night he raised the body, and immediately
+lowering it gently to the ground he attempted to strike matches, which
+the wind promptly extinguished. At last, by the flare of one of the
+matches, he saw that the bullet had carried away part of the skull, that
+the meninges were laid bare over an area as large as the palm of the
+hand; this area was grey, oozing blood, and very irregular in shape, its
+outlines reminding Ligny of the map of Africa. He was conscious of a
+sudden feeling of respect in the presence of this dead man. Placing his
+hands under the armpits, he dragged Chevalier with the minutest
+precautions into the room at the side. Leaving him there, he hurried
+through the house in quest of Felicie, calling to her.
+
+He found her in the bedroom, with her head buried under the bed-clothes
+of the unmade bed, crying: "Mamma! Mamma!" and repeating prayers.
+
+"Don't stay here, Felicie."
+
+She went downstairs with him. But, on reaching the hall, she said:
+
+"You know very well that we can't go out that way."
+
+He showed her out by the kitchen door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Left alone in the silent house, Robert de Ligny relit the lamp. Serious
+and even somewhat solemn voices were beginning to speak within him.
+Moulded from childhood by the rules of moral responsibility, he now
+experienced a sensation of painful regret, akin to remorse. Reflecting
+that he had caused the death of this man, albeit without intending it or
+knowing it, he did not feel wholly innocent. Shreds of his philosophic
+and religious training came back to him, disturbing his conscience. The
+phrases of moralists and preachers, learned at school, which had sunk to
+the very depths of his memory, suddenly rose in his mind. Its inward
+voices repeated them to him. They said, quoting some old religious
+orator: "When we abandon ourselves to irregularities of conduct, even to
+those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world, we render
+ourselves liable to commit the most reprehensible actions. We perceive,
+from the most frightful examples, that voluptuousness leads to crime."
+
+These maxims, upon which he had never reflected, suddenly assumed for
+him a precise and austere meaning. He thought the matter over seriously.
+But since his mind was not deeply religious, and since he was incapable
+of cherishing exaggerated scruples, he was conscious of only a passable
+degree of edification, which was steadily diminishing. Before long he
+decided that such scruples were out of place and that they could not
+possibly apply to the situation. "When we abandon ourselves to
+irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in
+the opinion of the world.... We perceive, from the most frightful
+examples...." These phrases, which only a little while ago had
+reverberated through his soul like a peal of thunder, he now heard in
+the snuffling and throaty voices of the professors and priests who had
+taught them to him, and he found them somewhat ridiculous. By a natural
+association of ideas he recalled a passage from an ancient Roman
+history--which he had read, when in the second form, during a certain
+course of study, and which had impressed itself on his mind--a few lines
+concerning a lady who was convicted of adultery and accused of having
+set fire to Rome. "So true it is," ran the historian's comment, "that a
+person who violates the laws of chastity is capable of any crime." He
+smiled inwardly at this recollection, reflecting that the moralists,
+after all, had queer ideas about life.
+
+The wick, which was charring, gave an insufficient light. He could not
+manage to snuff it, and it was giving out a horrible stench of paraffin.
+Thinking of the author of the passage relating to the Roman lady, he
+said to himself: "Sure enough, it was a queer idea that he got hold of
+there!"
+
+He felt reassured as to his innocence. His slight feeling of remorse had
+entirely evaporated, and he was unable to conceive how he could for a
+moment have believed himself responsible for Chevalier's death. Yet the
+affair troubled him.
+
+Suddenly he thought: "Supposing he were still alive!"
+
+A while ago, for the space of a second, by the light of a match blown
+out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor's skull.
+But what if he had seen incorrectly? What if he had taken a mere graze
+of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull? Does a man
+retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and
+horror? A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even
+particularly serious. It had certainly seemed to him that the man was
+dead. But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?
+
+He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and
+muttered:
+
+"This lamp is enough to poison one."
+
+Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr. Socrates, as to the
+origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally:
+
+"This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils."
+
+Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide. He
+remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing
+his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but
+had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club
+a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his
+brains but merely shot off an ear. These instances applied to Chevalier
+with striking exactitude.
+
+"Supposing he were not dead."
+
+He wished and hoped against all evidence that the unfortunate man might
+still be breathing, that he might be saved. He thought of fetching
+bandages, of giving first aid. Intending to re-examine the man lying in
+the front room, he raised the lamp, which was still emitting an
+insufficient light, too suddenly, and so extinguished it. Whereupon,
+surprised by the sudden darkness, he lost patience and exclaimed:
+
+"Confound the blasted thing!"
+
+While lighting it again, he flattered himself with the idea that
+Chevalier, once taken to hospital, would regain consciousness, and would
+live, and seeing him already on his feet, perched on his long legs,
+bawling, clearing his throat, sneering, his desire for his recovery
+became less eager; he was even beginning to cease to desire it, to
+regard it as annoying and inconsiderate. He asked himself anxiously,
+with a feeling of real uneasiness:
+
+"What in the world would he do if he came back, that dismal actor
+fellow? Would he return to the Odeon? Would he stroll through its
+corridors displaying his great scar? Would he once more have to see him
+prowling round Felicie?"
+
+He held the lighted lamp close to the body and recognized the livid
+bleeding wound, the irregular outline of which reminded him of the
+Africa of his schoolboy maps.
+
+Plainly death had been instantaneous, and he failed to understand how he
+could for a moment have doubted it.
+
+He left the house and proceeded to stride up and down in the garden. The
+image of the wound was flashing before his eyes like the impression
+caused by too bright a light. It moved away from him, increasing in size
+against the black sky; it took the shape of a pale continent whence he
+saw swarms of distracted little blacks pouring forth, armed with bows
+and arrows.
+
+He decided that the first thing to do was to fetch Madame Simonneau, who
+lived close at hand, in the Boulevard Bineau, in the residential part of
+the cafe. He closed the gate carefully, and went in search of the
+housekeeper. Once on the boulevard, he recovered his equanimity. He felt
+most uncomfortable about the accident; he accepted the accomplished
+fact, but he cavilled at fate in respect of the circumstances. Since
+there had to be a death, he gave his consent that there should be one,
+but he would have preferred another. Toward this one he was conscious of
+a feeling of disgust and repugnance. He said to himself vaguely:
+
+"I concede a suicide. But what is the good of a ridiculous and
+declamatory suicide? Couldn't the fellow have killed himself at home?
+Couldn't he, if his determination was irrevocable, have carried it out
+discreetly, with proper pride? That is what a gentleman would have done
+in his position. Then one might have pitied him, and respected his
+memory."
+
+He recalled word for word his conversation with Felicie in the bedroom
+an hour before the tragedy. He asked her if she had not for a time been
+Chevalier's mistress. He had asked her this, not because he wanted to
+know, for he had very little doubt of it, but in order to show that he
+knew it. And she had replied indignantly: "Chevalier? He? Good gracious
+no! You wouldn't have had me look at him!"
+
+He did not blame her for having lied. All women lie. He rather enjoyed
+the graceful and easy manner with which she had cast the fellow out of
+her past. But he was vexed with her for having given herself to a
+low-down actor. Chevalier spoilt Felicie for him. Why did she take
+lovers of that type? Was she wanting in taste? Did she not exercise a
+certain selection? Did she behave like a woman of the town? Did she lack
+a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may
+not do? Didn't she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing
+that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Felicie for the
+accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus.
+
+Madame Simonneau was not at home. He inquired her whereabouts of the
+waiters in the cafe, the grocer's assistants, the girls at the laundry,
+the police, and the postman. At last, following the direction of a
+neighbour, he found her poulticing an old lady, for she was a nurse. Her
+face was purple and she reeked of brandy. He sent her to watch the
+corpse. He instructed her to cover it with a sheet, and to hold herself
+at the disposal of the commissary and the doctor, who would come for the
+particulars. She replied, somewhat nettled, that she knew please God,
+what she had to do. She did indeed know. Madame Simonneau was born in a
+social circle which is obsequious to the constituted authorities and
+respects the dead. But when, having questioned Monsieur de Ligny, she
+learnt that he had dragged the body into the front room, she could not
+conceal from him that such behaviour was imprudent and might expose him
+to unpleasantness.
+
+"You ought not to have done it," she told him. "When anyone has killed
+himself, you must never touch him before the police come."
+
+Ligny thereupon went off to notify the commissary. The first excitement
+having passed off, he no longer felt any surprise, doubtless because
+events which, considered from a distance, would seem strange, when they
+take place before us appear quite natural, as indeed they are. They
+unfold themselves in an ordinary fashion, falling into place as a
+succession of petty facts, and eventually losing themselves in the
+everyday commonplace of life. His mind was distracted from the violent
+death of an unfortunate fellow-creature by the very circumstances of
+that death, by the part which he had played in the affair and the
+occupation which it had imposed upon him. On his way to the commissary's
+he felt as calm and as free from mental care as though he had been on
+his way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to decipher despatches.
+
+At nine o'clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden
+with his secretary and a policeman. The municipal physician, Monsieur
+Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame
+Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house
+exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles
+which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by
+an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated
+box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a
+candle.
+
+He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had
+just dined.
+
+"The bullet, a large calibre bullet," he said, "penetrated by way of the
+palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left
+parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and
+blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous."
+
+He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:
+
+"Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will
+probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was
+round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction."
+
+However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thin man with
+a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was
+howling outside the garden gate.
+
+"The direction of the wound," said the doctor, "as well as the fingers
+of the right hand, which are still contracted, are more than ample proof
+of suicide."
+
+He lit a cigar.
+
+"We are sufficiently informed," remarked the commissary.
+
+"I regret, gentlemen, to have disturbed you," said Robert de Ligny, "and
+I thank you for the courteous manner in which you have carried out your
+official duties."
+
+The secretary and the police agent, Madame Simonneau showing the way,
+carried the body up to the first floor.
+
+Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel was biting his nails and looking into space.
+
+"A tragedy of jealousy," he remarked, "nothing is more common. We have
+here in Neuilly a steady average of self-inflicted deaths. Out of a
+hundred suicides thirty are caused by gambling. The others are due to
+disappointment in love, poverty, or incurable disease."
+
+"Chevalier?" inquired Dr. Hibry, who was a lover of the theatre,
+"Chevalier? Wait a minute! I have seen him; I saw him at a benefit
+performance, at the Varietes. Of course! He recited a monologue."
+
+The dog howled outside the garden gate.
+
+"You cannot imagine," resumed the commissary, "the disasters caused in
+this municipality by the _pari mutuel_. I am not exaggerating when I
+assert that at least thirty per cent of the suicides which I have to
+look into are caused by gambling. Everybody gambles here. Every
+hairdresser's shop is a clandestine betting agency. No later than last
+week a concierge in the Avenue du Roule was found hanging from a tree in
+the Bois de Boulogne. Now, working men, servants, and junior clerks who
+gamble do not need to take their own lives. They move to another
+quarter, they disappear. But a man of position, an official whom
+gambling has ruined, who is overwhelmed by clamorous creditors,
+threatened with distraint, and on the point of being dragged before a
+court of justice, cannot disappear. What is to become of him?"
+
+"I have it!" exclaimed the physician. "He recited _The Duel in the
+Prairie_. People are rather tired of monologues, but that is very funny.
+You remember! 'Will you fight with the sword?' 'No, sir.' 'The pistol?'
+'No, sir.' 'The sabre, the knife?' 'No, sir.' 'Ah, then, I see what you
+want. You are not fastidious. What you want is a duel in the prairie. I
+agree. We will replace the prairie by a five-storied house. You are
+permitted to conceal yourself in the vegetation.' Chevalier used to
+recite _The Duel in the Prairie_ in a very humorous manner. He amused me
+greatly that night. It is true that I am not an ungrateful audience; I
+worship the theatre."
+
+The commissary was not listening. He was following up his own train of
+thought.
+
+"It will never be known, how many fortunes and lives are devoured each
+year by the _pari mutuel_. Gambling never releases its victims; when it
+has despoiled them of everything, it still remains their only hope. What
+else, indeed, will permit them to hope?"
+
+He ceased, straining his ear to catch the distant cry of a newsvendor,
+and rushed out into the avenue in pursuit of the fugitive yelping
+shadow, hailed him, and snatched from him a sporting paper, which he
+spread out under the light of a gas-lamp, scanning its pages for certain
+names of horses: _Fleur-des-pois_, _La Chatelaine_, _Lucrece_. With
+haggard eyes, trembling hands, dumbfounded, crushed, he dropped the
+sheet: his horse had not won.
+
+And Dr. Hibry, observing him from a distance, reflected that some day,
+in his capacity of physician to the dead, he might well be called upon
+to certify the suicide of his commissary of police, and he made up his
+mind in advance to conclude, as far as possible, that his death was due
+to accidental causes.
+
+Suddenly he seized his umbrella.
+
+"I must be off," he said. "I have been given a seat for the
+Opera-Comique to-night. It would be a pity to waste it."
+
+Before leaving the house, Ligny asked Madame Simonneau:
+
+"Where have you put him?"
+
+"In the bed," replied Madame Simonneau. "It was more decent."
+
+He made no objection, and raising his eyes to the front of the house, he
+saw at the windows of the bedroom, through the muslin curtains, the
+light of the two candles which the housekeeper had placed on the bedside
+table.
+
+"Perhaps," he said, "one might get a nun to watch by him."
+
+"It's not necessary," replied Madame Simonneau, who had invited some
+neighbours of her own sex, and had ordered her wine and meat. "It's not
+necessary, I will watch by him myself."
+
+Ligny did not press the point.
+
+The dog was still howling outside the gate.
+
+Returning on foot to the barrier, he noticed, over Paris, a reddish glow
+which filled the whole sky. Above the chimney-pots the factory chimneys
+rose grotesque and black, against this fiery mist, seeming to look down
+with a ridiculous familiarity upon the mysterious conflagration of a
+world. The few passers-by whom he met on the boulevard strolled along
+quietly, without raising their heads. Although he knew that when cities
+are wrapped in night the moist atmosphere often reflects the lights,
+becoming tinged with this uniform glow, which shines without a flicker,
+he fancied that he was looking at the reflection of a vast fire. He
+accepted, without reflection, the idea that Paris was sinking into the
+abyss of a prodigious conflagration; he found it natural that the
+private catastrophe in which he had become involved should be merged
+into a public disaster and that this same night should be for a whole
+population, as for him! a night of sinister happenings.
+
+Being extremely hungry, he took a cab at the barrier, and had himself
+driven to a restaurant in the Rue Royale. In the bright, warm room he
+was conscious of a sense of well-being. After ordering his meal, he
+opened an evening newspaper and saw, in the Parliamentary report, that
+his Minister had delivered a speech. On reading it, he smothered a
+slight laugh; he remembered certain stories told at the Quai d'Orsay.
+The Minister of Foreign Affairs was enamoured of Madame de Neuilles, an
+elderly lady with a lurid past, whom public rumour had raised to the
+status of adventuress and spy. He was wont, it was whispered, to try on
+her the speeches which he was to deliver in the Chamber. Ligny, who had
+formerly been to a certain small extent the lover of Madame de Neuilles,
+pictured to himself the statesman in his shirt reciting to his lady-love
+the following statement of principles: "Far be it from me to disregard
+the legitimate susceptibilities of the national sentiment. Resolutely
+pacific, but jealous of France's honour, the Government will, etc." This
+vision put him in a merry mood. He turned the page, and read: To-morrow
+at the Odeon, first performance (in this theatre) of _La Nuit du 23
+octobre 1812_ with Messieurs Durville, Maury, Romilly, Destree, Vicar,
+Leon Clim, Valroche, Aman, Chevalier....
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+At one o'clock on the following day _La Grille_ was in rehearsal, for
+the first time, in the green-room of the theatre. A dismal light spread
+like a pall over the grey stones of the roof, the galleries, and the
+columns. In the depressing majesty of this pallid architecture, beneath
+the statue of Racine, the leading actors were reading before Pradel, the
+manager of the house, their parts, which they did not yet know. Romilly,
+the stage manager, and Constantine Marc, the author of the piece, were
+all three seated on a red velvet sofa, while, from a bench set back
+between two columns, was exhaled the vigilant hatred and whispered
+jealousy of the actresses left out of the cast.
+
+The lover, Paul Delage, was with difficulty deciphering a speech:
+
+"'I recognize the chateau with its brick walls, its slated roof; the
+park, where I have so often entwined her initials and mine on the bark
+of the trees; the pond whose slumbering waters....'"
+
+Fagette rebuked him:
+
+"'Beware, Aimeri, lest the chateau know you not again, lest the park
+forget your name, lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"
+
+But she had a cold, and was reading from a manuscript copy full of
+mistakes.
+
+"Don't stand there, Fagette: it's the summer-house," said Romilly.
+
+"How do you expect me to know that?"
+
+"There's a chair put there."
+
+"'Lest the pond murmur: "Who is this stranger?"'"
+
+"Mademoiselle Nanteuil, it's your cue----Where has Nanteuil got to?
+Nanteuil!"
+
+Nanteuil came forward muffled up in her furs, her little bag and her
+part in her hand, white as a sheet, her eyes sunken, her legs nerveless.
+When fully awake she had seen the dead man enter her bedroom.
+
+She inquired:
+
+"Where do I make my entrance from?"
+
+"From the right."
+
+"All right."
+
+And she read:
+
+"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning, I do not know why it
+was. Can you perhaps tell me?'"
+
+Delage read his reply:
+
+"'It may be, Cecile, that it was due to a special dispensation of
+Providence or of fate. The God who loves you suffers you to smile, in
+the hour of weeping and the gnashing of teeth.'"
+
+"Nanteuil, my darling, you cross the stage," said Romilly. "Delage,
+stand aside a bit to let her pass."
+
+Nanteuil crossed over.
+
+"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them.
+They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"
+
+Romilly interrupted:
+
+"Delage, efface yourself a trifle; be careful not to hide her from the
+audience. Once more, Nanteuil."
+
+Nanteuil repeated:
+
+"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri? Our days are what we make them.
+They are terrible for evil-doers only.'"
+
+Constantin Marc no longer recognized his handiwork, he could no longer
+even hear the sound of his beloved phrases, which he had so often
+repeated to himself in the Vivarais woods. Dumbfounded and dazed, he
+held his peace.
+
+Nanteuil tripped daintily across the stage, and resumed reading her
+part:
+
+"'You will perhaps think me very foolish, Aimeri; in the convent where I
+was brought up, I often used to envy the fate of the victims.'"
+
+Delage took up his cue, but he had overlooked a page of the manuscript:
+
+"'The weather is magnificent. Already the guests are strolling about the
+garden.'"
+
+It became necessary to start all over again.
+
+"'Terrible days, do you say, Aimeri....'"
+
+And so they proceeded, without troubling to understand, but careful to
+regulate their movements, as if studying the figures of a dance.
+
+"In the interests of the play, we shall have to make some cuts," said
+Pradel to the dismayed author.
+
+And Delage continued:
+
+"'Do not blame me, Cecile: I felt for you a friendship dating from
+childhood, one of those fraternal friendships which impart to the love
+which springs from them a disquieting appearance of incest.'"
+
+"Incest," shouted Pradel. "You cannot let the word 'incest' remain,
+Monsieur Constantin Marc. The public has susceptibilities of which you
+have no idea. Moreover, the order of the two speeches which follow must
+be transposed. The optics of the stage require it."
+
+The rehearsal was interrupted. Romilly caught sight of Durville who, in
+a recess, was telling racy stories.
+
+"Durville, you can go. The second act will not be rehearsed to-day."
+
+Before leaving, the old actor went up to Nanteuil, to press her hand.
+Judging that this was the moment to assure her of his sympathy, he
+summoned up the tears to his eyes, as anyone condoling with her would
+have done in his place. But he did it admirably. The pupils of his eyes
+swam in their orbits, like the moon amid clouds. The corners of his lips
+were turned down in two deep furrows which prolonged them to the bottom
+of his chin. He appeared to be genuinely afflicted.
+
+"My poor darling," he sighed, "I pity you, I do indeed! To see one for
+whom one has experienced a--feeling--with whom one has--lived in
+intimacy--to see him carried off at a blow--a tragic blow--is hard, is
+terrible!"
+
+And he extended his compassionate hands. Nanteuil, completely unnerved,
+and crushing her tiny handkerchief and her part in her hands, turned her
+back upon him, and hissed between her teeth:
+
+"Old idiot!"
+
+Fagette passed her arm round her waist, and led her gently aside to the
+foot of Racine's statue, where she whispered into her ear:
+
+"Listen to me, my dear. This affair must be completely hushed up.
+Everybody is talking about it. If you let people talk, they will brand
+you for life as Chevalier's widow."
+
+Then, being something of a talker, she added:
+
+"I know you, I am your best friend. I know your value. But beware,
+Felicie: women are held at their own valuation."
+
+Every one of Fagette's shafts told. Nanteuil, with fiery cheeks, held
+back her tears. Too young to possess or even to desire the prudence
+which comes to celebrated actresses when of an age to graduate as women
+of the world of fashion, she was full of self-esteem, and since she had
+known what it was to love another she was eager to efface everything
+unfashionable from her past; she felt that Chevalier, in killing himself
+for her sake, had behaved towards her publicly with a familiarity which
+made her ridiculous. Still unaware that all things fall into oblivion,
+and are lost in the swift current of our days, that all our actions flow
+like the waters of a river, between banks that have no memory, she
+pondered, irritated and dejected, at the feet of Jean Racine, who
+understood her grief.
+
+"Just look at her," said Madame Marie-Claire to young Delage. "She wants
+to cry. I understand her. A man killed himself for me. I was greatly
+upset by it. He was a count."
+
+"Well, begin again!" shouted Pradel. "Come now, Mademoiselle Nanteuil,
+your cue!"
+
+Whereupon Nanteuil:
+
+"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"
+
+Suddenly, Madame Doulce appeared. Ponderous and mournful, she let fall
+the following words:
+
+"I have very sad news. The parish priest will not allow him to enter his
+church."
+
+As Chevalier had no relations left other than a sister, a working-woman
+at Pantin, Madame Doulce had undertaken to make arrangements for the
+funeral at the expense of the members of the company.
+
+They gathered round her. She continued:
+
+"The Church rejects him as though he were accurst! That's dreadful!"
+
+"Why?" asked Romilly.
+
+Madame Doulce replied in a very low tone and as if reluctantly:
+
+"Because he committed suicide."
+
+"We must see to this," said Pradel.
+
+Romilly displayed an eager desire to be of service.
+
+"The cure knows me," he said. "He is a very decent fellow. I'll just run
+over to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and I'd be greatly surprised if----"
+
+Madame Doulce shook her head sadly:
+
+"All is useless."
+
+"All the same, we must have a religious service," said Romilly, with all
+the authority of a stage-manager.
+
+"Quite so," said Madame Doulce.
+
+Madame Marie-Claire, deeply exercised in her mind, was of opinion that
+the priests could be compelled to say a Mass.
+
+"Let us keep cool," said Pradel, caressing his venerable beard. "Under
+Louis VIII the people broke in the doors of Saint-Roch, which had been
+closed to the coffin of Mademoiselle Raucourt. We live in other times,
+and under different circumstances. We must have recourse to gentler
+methods."
+
+Constantin Marc, seeing to his great regret that his play was abandoned,
+had likewise approached Madame Doulce; he inquired of her:
+
+"Why should you want Chevalier to be blessed by the Church? Personally,
+I am a Catholic. With me, it is not a faith, it is a system, and I look
+upon it as a duty to participate in all the external practices of
+worship. I am on the side of all authorities. I am for the judge, the
+soldier, the priest. I cannot therefore be suspected of favouring civil
+burials. But I hardly understand why you persist in offering the cure of
+Saint-Etienne-du-Mont a dead body which he repudiates. Now why do you
+want this unfortunate Chevalier to go to church?"
+
+"Why?" replied Madame Doulce. "For the salvation of his soul and because
+it is more seemly."
+
+"What would be seemly," replied Constantin Marc, "would be to obey the
+laws of the Church, which excommunicates suicides."
+
+"Monsieur Constantin Marc, have you read _Les Soirees de Neuilly_?"
+inquired Pradel, who was an ardent collector of old books and a great
+reader. "What, you have not read _Les Soirees de Neuilly_, by Monsieur
+de Fongeray? You have missed something. It is a curious book, which can
+still be met with sometimes on the quays. It is adorned by a lithograph
+of Henry Monnier's, which is, I don't know why, a caricature of
+Stendhal. Fongeray is the pseudonym of two Liberals of the Restoration,
+Dittmer and Cave. The work consists of comedies and dramas which cannot
+be acted; but which contain some most interesting scenes representing
+manners and customs. You will read in it how, in the reign of Charles X,
+a vicar of one of the Paris churches, the Abbe Mouchaud, would refuse
+burial to a pious lady, and would, at all costs, grant it to an atheist.
+Madame d'Hautefeuille was religious, but she held some national
+property. At her death, she received the ministrations of a Jansenist
+priest. For this reason, after her death, the Abbe Mouchaud refused to
+receive her into the church in which she had passed her life. At the
+same time, in the same parish, Monsieur Dubourg, a big banker, was good
+enough to die. In his will he stipulated that he should be borne
+straight to the cemetery. 'He is a Catholic,' reflected the Abbe
+Mouchaud, 'he belongs to us.' Quickly making a parcel of his stole and
+surplice, he rushed off to the dead man's house, administered extreme
+unction, and brought him into his church."
+
+"Well," replied Constantin Marc, "that vicar was an excellent
+politician. Atheists are not formidable enemies of the Church. They do
+not count as adversaries. They cannot raise a Church against her, and
+they do not dream of doing so. Atheists have existed at all times among
+the heads and princes of the Church, and many of them have rendered
+signal services to the Papacy. On the other hand, whoever does not
+submit strictly to ecclesiastical discipline and breaks away from
+tradition upon a single point, whoever sets up a faith against the
+faith, an opinion, a practices against the accepted opinion and the
+common practice, is a factor of disorder, a menace of peril, and must be
+extirpated. This the vicar, Mouchaud, understood. He should have been
+made a Cardinal."
+
+Madame Doulce, who had been clever enough not to tell everything in a
+breath, went on to say:
+
+"I did not allow myself to be discomfited by the opposition of Monsieur
+le Cure. I begged, I entreated. And his answer was: 'We owe respectful
+obedience to the Ordinary. Go to the Archbishop's Palace. I will do as
+Monseigneur bids me.' There is nothing left for me but to follow this
+advice. I'm hurrying off to the Archbishop's Palace."
+
+"Let us get to work," said Pradel.
+
+Romilly called to Nanteuil:
+
+"Nanteuil! Come, Nanteuil, begin your whole scene over again."
+
+And Nanteuil said once more:
+
+"'Cousin, I was so happy when I awoke this morning....'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The prominence given by the Press to the suicide of the Boulevard de
+Villiers rendered the negotiations between the Stage and the Church all
+the more difficult. The reporters had given the fullest details of the
+event, and it was pointed out by the Abbe Mirabelle, the Archbishop's
+second vicar, that to open the doors of the parish church to Chevalier,
+as matters then stood, was to proclaim that excommunicated persons were
+entitled to the prayers of the Church.
+
+But for that matter, Monsieur Mirabelle himself, who in this affair
+displayed great wisdom and circumspection, paved the way to a solution.
+
+"You must fully understand," he observed to Madame Doulce, "that the
+opinion of the newspapers cannot affect our decision. We are absolutely
+indifferent to it, and we do not disturb ourselves in the slightest
+degree, no matter what fifty public sheets may say about the unfortunate
+young fellow. Whether the journalists have told the truth or distorted
+it is their affair, not mine. I do not know and I do not wish to know
+what they have written. But the fact of the suicide is notorious. You
+cannot dispute it. It would now be advisable to investigate closely, and
+by the light of science, the circumstances in which the deed was
+committed. Do not be surprised by my thus invoking the aid of science.
+Science has no better friend than religion. Now medical science may in
+the present case be of great assistance to us. You will understand in a
+moment. Mother Church ejects the suicide from her bosom only when his
+act is an act of despair. The madmen who attempt their own lives are not
+those who have lost all hope, and the Church does not deny them her
+prayers; she prays for all who are unfortunate. Now, if it could be
+proved that this poor boy had acted under the influence of a high fever
+or of a mental disorder, if a medical man were in a position to certify
+that the poor fellow was not in possession of his faculties when he slew
+himself with his own hand, there would be no obstacle to the celebration
+of a religious service."
+
+Having hearkened to the words of Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle, Madame
+Doulce hastened back to the theatre. The rehearsal of _La Grille_ was
+over. She found Pradel in his office with a couple of young actresses,
+one of whom was soliciting an engagement, the other, leave of absence.
+He refused, in conformity with his principle never to grant a request
+until he had first refused it. In this way he bestowed a value upon his
+most trifling concessions. His glistening eyes and his patriarchal
+beard, his manner, at once amorous and paternal, gave him a resemblance
+to Lot, as we see him between his two daughters in the prints of the Old
+Masters. Standing on the table was an amphora of gilt pasteboard which
+fostered this illusion.
+
+"It can't be done," he was telling each of them. "It really can't be
+done, my child----Well, after all, look in to-morrow."
+
+Having dismissed them, he inquired, as he signed some letters:
+
+"Well, Madame Doulce, what news do you bring?"
+
+Constantin Marc, appearing with Nanteuil, hastily exclaimed:
+
+"What about my scenery, Monsieur Pradel?"
+
+Thereupon he described for the twentieth time the landscape, upon which
+the curtain ought to rise.
+
+"In the foreground, an old park. The trunks of the great trees, on the
+north side, are green with moss. The dampness of the soil must be felt."
+
+And the manager replied:
+
+"You may rest assured that everything that can be done will be done, and
+that it will be most appropriate. Well, Madame Doulce, what news?"
+
+"There is a glimmer of hope," she replied.
+
+"At the back, in a slight mist," said the author, "the grey stones and
+the slate roofs of the Abbaye-aux-Dames."
+
+"Quite so. Pray be seated, Madame Doulce; you have my attention."
+
+"I was most courteously received at the Archbishop's Palace," said
+Madame Doulce.
+
+"Monsieur Pradel, it is imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should
+appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists
+of coming night. A pale-gold sky----"
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle," resumed Madame Doulce, "is a priest of the
+highest distinction----"
+
+"Monsieur Marc, are you particularly keen on your pale-gold sky?"
+inquired the stage manager. "Go on, Madame Doulce, go on, I am listening
+to you."
+
+"And exquisitely polite. He made a delicate allusion to the
+indiscretions of the newspapers----"
+
+At this moment Monsieur Marchegeay, the stage manager, burst into the
+room. His green eyes were glittering, and his red moustache was dancing
+like a flame. The words rolled off his tongue:
+
+"They are at it again! Lydie, the little super, is screaming like a
+stoat on the stairs. She says Delage tried to violate her. It's at least
+the tenth time in a month that she has come out with that story. This
+is an infernal nuisance!"
+
+"Such conduct cannot be tolerated in a house like this," said Pradel.
+"You'll have to fine Delage. Pray continue, Madame Doulce."
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle explained to me in the clearest manner that
+suicide is an act of despair."
+
+But Constantin Marc was inquiring of Pradel with interest, whether
+Lydie, the little super, was pretty.
+
+"You have seen her in _La Nuit du 23 octobre_; she plays the woman of
+the people who, in the Plaine de Grenelle, is buying wafers of Madame
+Ravaud."
+
+"A very pretty girl, to my thinking," said Constantin Marc.
+
+"Undoubtedly," responded Pradel. "But she would be still prettier if her
+ankles weren't like stakes."
+
+And Constantin Marc musingly replied.
+
+"And Delage has outraged her. That fellow possesses the sense of love.
+Love is a simple and primitive act. It's a struggle, it's hatred.
+Violence is necessary to it. Love by mutual consent is merely a tedious
+obligation."
+
+And he cried, greatly excited.
+
+"Delage is prodigious!"
+
+"Don't get yourself into a fix," said Pradel.
+
+"This same little Lydie entices my actors into her dressing-room, and
+then all of a sudden she screams out that she is being outraged in order
+to get hush-money out of them. It's her lover who has taught her the
+trick, and takes the coin. You were saying, Madame Doulce----"
+
+"After a long and interesting conversation," resumed Madame Doulce,
+"Monsieur l'Abbe Mirabelle suggested a favourable solution. He gave me
+to understand that, in order to remove all difficulties, it would be
+sufficient for a physician to certify that Chevalier was not in full
+possession of his faculties, and that he was not responsible for his
+acts."
+
+"But," observed Pradel, "Chevalier wasn't insane. He was in full
+possession of his faculties."
+
+"It's not for us to say," replied Madame Doulce. "What do we know about
+it?"
+
+"No," said Nanteuil, "he was not in full possession of his faculties."
+
+Pradel shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"After all, it's possible. Insanity and reason, it's a matter of
+appreciation. To whom could we apply for a certificate?"
+
+Madame Doulce and Pradel called to mind three physicians in succession;
+but they were unable to find the address of the first; the second was
+bad-tempered, and it was decided that the third was dead.
+
+Nanteuil suggested that they should approach Dr. Trublet.
+
+"That's an idea!" exclaimed Pradel. "Let us ask a certificate of Dr.
+Socrates. What's to-day? Friday. It's his day for consultations. We
+shall find him at home."
+
+Dr. Trublet lived in an old house at the top of the Rue de Seine. Pradel
+took Nanteuil with him, with the idea that Socrates would refuse nothing
+to a pretty woman. Constantin Marc, who could not live, when in Paris,
+save in the company of theatrical folk, accompanied them. The Chevalier
+affair was beginning to amuse him. He found it theatrical, that is,
+appropriate to theatrical performers. Although the hour for
+consultations was over, the doctor's sitting-room was still full of
+people in search of healing. Trublet dismissed them, and received his
+theatrical friends in his private room. He was standing in front of a
+table encumbered with books and papers. An adjustable arm-chair, infirm
+and cynical, displayed itself by the window. The director of the Odeon
+set forth the object of his call, and ended by saying:
+
+"Chevalier's funeral service cannot be celebrated in the church unless
+you certify that the unfortunate young man was not altogether sane."
+
+Dr. Trublet declared that Chevalier might very well do without a
+religious service.
+
+"Adrienne Lecouvreur, who was of more account than Chevalier, did
+without one. Mademoiselle Monime had no Mass said for her after her
+death, and, as you are aware, she was denied 'the honour of rotting in a
+nasty cemetery in the company of all the beggars of the quarter.' She
+was none the worse off for that."
+
+"You are not ignorant of the fact, Dr. Socrates," replied Pradel, "that
+actors and actresses are the most religious of people. My company would
+be deeply grieved if they could not be present at the celebration of a
+Mass for their colleague. They have already secured the co-operation of
+several lyric artists, and the music will be very fine."
+
+"Now that's a reason," said Trublet "I do not gainsay it. Charles
+Monselet, who was a witty fellow, was reflecting, only a few hours
+before his death, on his musical Mass, 'I know a great many singers at
+the Opera,' he said, 'I shall have a _Pie Jesu aux truffes_.' But, as on
+this occasion the Archbishop does not authorize a spiritual concert, it
+would be more convenient to postpone it to some other occasion."
+
+"As far as I am concerned," replied the director, "I have no religious
+belief. But I consider that the Church and the Stage are two great
+social powers, and that it is beneficial that they should be friends and
+allies. For my own part, I never lose an opportunity of sealing the
+alliance. This coming Lent, I shall have Durville read one of
+Bourdaloue's sermons. I receive a State subsidy. I must observe the
+Concordat. Moreover, whatever people may say, Catholicism is the most
+acceptable form of religious indifference."
+
+"Well then," objected Constantin Marc, "since you wish to show deference
+to the Church, why do you foist upon her, by force or by subterfuge, a
+coffin which she doesn't want?"
+
+The doctor spoke in a similar strain, and ended by saying.
+
+"My dear Pradel, don't you have anything more to do with the matter."
+
+"Whereupon Nanteuil, her eyes blazing, her voice sibilant, cried:
+
+"He must go to church, doctor; sign what is asked of you, write that he
+was not in possession of his faculties, I entreat you."
+
+There was not religion alone at the back of this desire. Blended with it
+was an intimate feeling, an obscure background of old beliefs, of which
+she herself was unaware. She hoped that if he were carried into the
+church, and sprinkled with holy water, Chevalier would be appeased,
+would become one of the peaceful dead, and would no longer torment her.
+She feared, on the other hand, that if he were deprived of benediction
+and prayers he would perpetually hover about her, accursed and
+maleficent. And, more simply still, in her dread of seeing him again,
+she was anxious that the priests should take good care to bury him, and
+that everybody should attend the funeral, so that he should be all the
+more thoroughly buried; as thoroughly buried, in short, as it was
+possible to be. Her lips trembled and she wrung her hands.
+
+Trublet, who had long graduated in human nature, watched her with
+interest. He understood and took a special interest in the female of the
+human machine. This particular specimen filled him with joy. His
+snub-nosed face beamed with delight as he watched her.
+
+"Don't be uneasy, child. There is always a way of coming to an
+understanding with the Church. What you are asking me is not within my
+powers; I am a lay doctor. But we have to-day, thank God, religious
+physicians who send their patients to the ecclesiastical waters, and
+whose special function is to attest miraculous cures. I know one who
+lives in this part of the town; I'll give you his address. Go and see
+him; the Bishop will refuse him nothing. He will arrange the matter for
+you."
+
+"Not at all," said Pradel. "You always attended poor Chevalier. It is
+for you to give a certificate."
+
+Romilly agreed:
+
+"Of course, doctor. You are the physician to the theatre. We must wash
+our dirty linen at home."
+
+At the same time, Nanteuil turned upon Socrates a gaze of entreaty.
+
+"But," objected Trublet, "what do you want me to say?"
+
+"It's very simple," Pradel replied. "Say that he was to a certain extent
+irresponsible."
+
+"You are simply asking me to speak like a police surgeon. It's expecting
+too much of me."
+
+"You believe then, doctor, that Chevalier was fully and entirely morally
+responsible?"
+
+"Quite the contrary. I am of opinion that he was not in the least
+responsible for his actions."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"But I also consider that, in this respect, he differed in nowise from
+you, myself, and all other men. My judicial colleagues distinguish
+between individual responsibilities. They have procedures by which they
+recognize full responsibilities, and those which lack one or more
+fractional parts. It is a remarkable fact, moreover, that in order to
+get a poor wretch condemned they always find him fully responsible. May
+we not therefore consider that their own responsibility is full--like
+the moon?"
+
+And Dr. Socrates proceeded to unfold before the astonished stage folk a
+comprehensive theory of universal determinism. He went back to the
+origins of life, and, like the Silenus of Virgil, who, smeared with the
+juice of mulberries, sang to the shepherds of Sicily and the naiad
+Aglaia of the origin of the world, he broke out into a flood of words:
+
+"To call upon a poor wretch to answer for his actions! Why, even when
+the solar system was still no more than a pale nebula, forming, in the
+ether, a fragile halo, whose circumference was a thousand times greater
+than the orbit of Neptune, we had all of us, for ages past, been fully
+conditioned, determined and irrevocably destined, and your
+responsibility, my dear child, my responsibility, Chevalier's, and that
+of all men, had been, not mitigated, but abolished beforehand. All our
+movements, the result of previous movements of matter, are subject to
+the laws which govern the cosmic forces, and the human mechanism is
+merely a particular instance of the universal mechanism."
+
+Pointing to a locked cupboard, he proceeded.
+
+"I have there, contained in bottles, that which would transform,
+destroy, or excite to frenzy the will of fifty thousand men."
+
+"Wouldn't be playing the game," objected Pradel.
+
+"I agree, it wouldn't be playing the game. But these substances are not
+essentially laboratory products. The laboratory combines, it does not
+create anything. These substances are scattered throughout nature. In
+their free state, they surround and enter into us, they determine our
+will, they circumscribe our freedom of device, which is merely the
+illusion engendered within us by the ignorance of our determinations."
+
+"What on earth do you mean?" asked Pradel, taken aback.
+
+"I mean that our will is an illusion caused by our ignorance of the
+causes which compel us to exert our will. That which wills within us is
+not ourselves, but myriads of cells of prodigious activity, of which we
+know nothing, which are unaware of us, which are ignorant of one
+another, but which nevertheless constitute us. By means of their
+restlessness they produce innumerable currents which we call our
+passions, our thoughts, our joys, our sufferings, our desires, our
+fears, and our will. We believe that we are our own masters, while a
+mere drop of alcohol stimulates, and then benumbs the very elements by
+which we feel and will."
+
+Constantin Marc interrupted the physician:
+
+"Excuse me! Since you are speaking of the action of alcohol, I should
+like your advice on the subject. I am in the habit of drinking a small
+glass of Armagnac brandy after each meal. That's not too much, is it?"
+
+"It's a great deal too much. Alcohol is a poison. If you have a bottle
+of brandy at home, fling it out of the window."
+
+Pradel was pondering. He considered that in suppressing will and
+responsibility in all human things Dr. Socrates was doing him a personal
+injury.
+
+"You may say what you like. Will and responsibility are not illusions.
+They are tangible and powerful realities. I know how the terms of my
+contract bind me, and I impose my will on others."
+
+And he added with some bitterness:
+
+"I believe in the will, in moral responsibility, in the distinction
+between good and evil. Doubtless these are, according to you, stupid
+ideas."
+
+"They are indeed stupid ideas," replied the physician, "but they are
+very suitable to us, since we are mere animals. We are for ever
+forgetting this. They are stupid, venerable, wholesome ideas. Men have
+felt that, without these ideas, they would all go mad. They had only the
+choice between stupidity and madness. Very reasonably they chose
+stupidity. Such is the foundation of moral ideas."
+
+"What a paradox!" exclaimed Romilly.
+
+The physician calmly proceeded:
+
+"The distinction between good and evil in human societies has never
+emerged from the grossest empiricism. It was constituted in a wholly
+practical spirit and as a simple convenience. We do not trouble
+ourselves about it where cut-glass or a tree is concerned. We practise
+moral indifference with regard to animals. We practise it in the case of
+savage races. This enables us to exterminate them without remorse.
+That's what is known as the colonial policy. Nor do we find that
+believers exact a high degree of morality from their god. In the present
+state of society, they would not willingly admit that he was lecherous
+or compromised himself with women; but they do think it fitting that he
+should be vindictive and cruel. Morality is a mutual agreement to keep
+what we possess: land, houses, furniture, women, and our lives. It does
+not imply, in the case of those who bow to it, any particular
+intelligence or character. It is instinctive and ferocious. Written law
+follows it closely, and is in more or less harmonious agreement with it.
+Hence we see that great-hearted men, or men of brilliant genius, have
+almost all been accused of impiety, and, like Socrates, the son of
+Phenaretes, and Benoit Malon, have been smitten by the tribunals of
+their country. And it may be stated that a man who has not, at the very
+least, been sentenced to imprisonment does little credit to the land of
+his fathers."
+
+"There are exceptions," remarked Pradel.
+
+"Few," replied Dr. Trublet.
+
+But Nanteuil, pursuing her idea, remarked.
+
+"My little Socrates, you can very well certify that he was insane. It is
+the truth. He was not sane, I know it only too well."
+
+"No doubt he was mad, my dear child. But it is a question of determining
+whether he was madder than other men. The entire history of humanity,
+replete with tortures, ecstasies, and massacres, is the history of
+raving, demented creatures."
+
+"Doctor," inquired Constantin Marc, "are you by chance one of those who
+do not admire War? It is nevertheless a magnificent thing, when you come
+to think of it. The animals merely eat one another. Men have conceived
+the idea of beautiful massacres. They have learnt to kill one another in
+glittering cuirasses, in helmets topped with plumes, or maned with
+scarlet. By the use of artillery, and the art of fortification, they
+have introduced chemistry and mathematics among the necessary means of
+destruction. War is a sublime invention. And, since the extermination of
+human beings appears to us the only object of life, the wisdom of man
+resides in this, that he has made this extermination a delight and a
+splendour. After all, doctor, you cannot deny that murder is a law of
+nature, and that it is consequently divine."
+
+To which Dr. Socrates replied:
+
+"We are only miserable animals, and yet we are our own providence and
+our own gods. The lower animals, whose immemorial reign preceded our own
+upon this planet, have transformed it by their genius and their courage.
+The insects have traced roads, excavated the soil, hollowed the trunks
+of trees and rocks, built dwellings, founded cities, metamorphosed the
+soil, the air, and the waters. The labour of the humblest of these, that
+of the madrepores, has created islands and continents. Every material
+change produces a moral change, since morals depend upon environment.
+The transformation to which man in his turn has subjected the earth is
+undoubtedly more profound and more harmonious than the transformation
+wrought by other animals. Why should not humanity succeed in changing
+nature to the extent of making it pacific? Why should not humanity,
+miserably puny though it is and will be, succeed, some day, in
+suppressing, or at least in controlling the struggle for life? Why
+indeed should not humanity abolish the law of murder? We may expect a
+great deal from chemistry. Yet I do not guarantee anything. It is
+possible that our race will persist in melancholy, delirium, mania,
+dementia, and stupor until its lamentable end amid ice and darkness.
+This world is perhaps irremediably wicked. At all events, I shall have
+got plenty of amusement out of it. It affords those who are in it an
+interesting spectacle, and I am beginning to think that Chevalier was
+madder than the rest in that he voluntarily left his seat."
+
+Nanteuil took a pen from the desk, and held it out, dipped in ink, to
+the doctor.
+
+He began to write:
+
+"Having been called on several occasions to attend----"
+
+He interrupted himself to ask Chevalier's Christian name.
+
+"Aime," replied Nanteuil.
+
+"Aime Chevalier, I have noticed in his system certain disorders of
+sensibility, vision and motor control, ordinary indications of----"
+
+He went to fetch a book from a shelf of his library.
+
+"It's a thousand chances that I shall find something to confirm my
+diagnosis in the lectures of Professor Ball on mental diseases."
+
+He turned over the leaves of the book.
+
+"Just see, my dear Romilly, this is what I find to begin with; in the
+eighteenth lecture, page 389: 'Many madmen are to be met with among
+actors.' This remark of Professor Ball's reminds me that the celebrated
+Cabanis one day asked Dr. Esprit Blanche whether the stage was not a
+cause of madness."
+
+"Really?" asked Romilly uneasily.
+
+"Not a doubt of it," replied Trublet. "But listen to what Professor Ball
+says on the same page. 'It is an incontestable fact that medical men are
+excessively predisposed to mental aberration.' Nothing is truer. Among
+medical men, those who are more especially predestined to insanity are
+the alienists. It is often difficult to determine which of the two is
+the crazier, the madman or his doctor. People say too that men of genius
+are prone to insanity. That is certainly the case. Still, a man is not a
+reasoning being merely because he is an idiot."
+
+After glancing a little further through the pages of Professor Ball's
+lectures, he resumed his writing:
+
+"Ordinary indications of maniacal excitement, and, if it be taken into
+consideration that the subject was of a neuropathic temperament, there
+is reason to believe that his constitution predisposed him to insanity,
+which, according to the highest authorities, is merely an exaggeration
+of the habitual temperament of the individual, and hence it is not
+possible to credit him with full moral responsibility."
+
+He signed the sheet and handed it to Pradel, saying:
+
+"Here's something that is innocuous and too devoid of meaning to contain
+the slightest falsehood."
+
+Pradel rose and said:
+
+"Believe me, my dear doctors we should not have asked you to tell a
+lie."
+
+"Why not? I am a medical man. I keep a lie-shop. I relieve, I console.
+How is it possible to relieve and console without lying?"
+
+Then, with a sympathetic glance at Nanteuil; he added:
+
+"Only women and physicians know how necessary untruthfulness is, and how
+beneficial to man."
+
+And, as Pradel, Constantin Mate, and Romilly were taking their leave, he
+said:
+
+"Pray go out by the dining-room. I've just received a small cask of old
+Armagnac. You'll tell me what you think of it!"
+
+Nanteuil had remained behind in the doctor's consulting room.
+
+"My little Socrates, I have spent an awful night. I saw him."
+
+"During your sleep?"
+
+"No, when wide awake."
+
+"You are sure you were not sleeping?"
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+He was on the point of asking her if the apparition had spoken to her.
+But he left the question unspoken, fearing lest he might suggest to so
+sensitive a subject those hallucinations of the sense of hearing, which,
+by reason of their imperious nature, he dreaded far more than visual
+hallucinations. He was familiar with the docility of the sick in obeying
+orders given them by voices. Abandoning the idea of questioning Felicie,
+he resolved, at all hazards, to remove any scruples of conscience which
+might be troubling her. At the same time, having observed that,
+generally speaking, the sense of moral responsibility is weak in women,
+he made no great effort in that direction, and contented himself with
+remarking lightly:
+
+"My dear child, you must not consider yourself responsible for the death
+of that poor fellow. A suicide inspired by passion is the inevitable
+termination of a pathological condition. Every individual who commits
+suicide had to commit suicide. You are merely the incidental cause of an
+accident, which is, of course, deplorable, but the importance of which
+should not be exaggerated."
+
+Thinking that he had said enough on this score, he applied himself
+immediately to dispersing the terrors which surrounded her. He sought to
+convince her by simple arguments that she was beholding images which had
+no reality, mere reflections of her own thoughts. In order to
+illustrate his demonstration, he told her a story of a reassuring
+nature.
+
+"An English physician," he told her, "was attending a lady, like
+yourself, highly intelligent, who, like yourself, was in the habit of
+seeing cats under her furniture, and was visited by phantoms. He
+convinced her that these apparitions corresponded to nothing in reality.
+She believed him, and worried herself no longer. One fine day, after a
+long period of retirement, she reappeared in society, and on entering a
+drawing-room she saw the lady of the house who, pointing to an
+arm-chair, begged her to be seated. She also saw, seated in this chair,
+a crafty-looking old gentleman. She argued to herself that one of the
+two persons was necessarily a creature of the imagination, and, deciding
+that the gentleman had no real existence, she sat down on the arm-chair.
+On touching the bottom, she drew a long breath. From that day onward,
+she never again set eyes on any further phantoms, either of man or of
+beast. When smothering the crafty-looking old gentleman, she had
+smothered them all--fundamentally."
+
+Felicie shook her head, saying:
+
+"That does not apply to this case."
+
+She meant to say that her own phantom was not a grotesque old man, on
+whom one could sit, but a jealous dead man who did not pay her visits
+without some object. But she feared to speak of these things; and,
+letting her hands fall upon her knees, she held her peace.
+
+Seeing her thus, dejected and crushed, he pointed out that these
+disorders of the vision were neither rare nor very serious, and that
+they soon vanished without leaving any traces.
+
+"I myself," he said, "once had a vision."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yes, I had a vision, some twenty years ago. It was in Egypt."
+
+He noticed that she was looking at him inquiringly, so he began the
+story of his hallucination, having switched on all the electric lights,
+in order to disperse the phantoms of darkness.
+
+"In the days when I was practising in Cairo, I was accustomed, in the
+February of each year, to go up the Nile as far as Luxor, and thence I
+proceeded, in company with some friends, to visit the tombs and temples
+in the desert. These trips across the sands are made on donkey-back. The
+last time I went to Luxor I hired a young donkey-boy, whose white donkey
+Rameses was stronger than the others. This donkey-boy, whose name was
+Selim, was also stronger, slenderer, and better looking than the other
+donkey-boys. He was fifteen years old. His shy, gentle eyes shone from
+behind a magnificent veil of long black lashes; his brown face was a
+pure clear-cut oval. He tramped barefoot through the desert with a step
+which made one think of those dances of warriors of which the Bible
+speaks. His every movement was graceful; his young animal-like gaiety
+was charming. As he prodded Rameses' back with the point of his stick,
+he would chatter to me in a limited vocabulary in which English, French
+and Arabic were intermingled; he enjoyed telling me of the travellers
+whom he had escorted and who, he believed, were all princes or
+princesses; but if I asked him about his relations or his companions he
+remained silent, and assumed an air of indifference and boredom. When
+cadging for a promise of substantial baksheesh, the nasal twang of his
+voice assumed caressing inflexions. He thought out subtle stratagems and
+expended whole treasuries of prayers in order to obtain a cigarette.
+Noticing that I liked to see the donkey-boys treat their beasts with
+kindness, he used, in my presence, to kiss Rameses on the nostrils, and
+when we halted he would waltz with him. He often displayed real
+ingenuity in getting what he wanted. But he was far too short-sighted
+ever to show the slightest gratitude for what he had obtained. Greedy of
+piastres, he coveted still more eagerly such small glittering articles
+as one cannot keep covered--gold scarf-pins, rings, sleeve-links, or
+nickel cigar-lighters; and when he saw a gold chain his face would
+light up with a gleam of pleasure.
+
+"The following summer was the hardest time of my life. An epidemic of
+cholera had broken out in Lower Egypt. I was running about the town all
+day long in a scorching atmosphere. Cairo summers are overpowering to
+Europeans. We were going through the hottest weeks I had ever known. I
+heard one day that Selim, brought before the native court of Cairo, had
+been sentenced to death. He had murdered the daughter of some fellaheen,
+a little girl nine years old, in order to rob her of her ear-rings, and
+had thrown her into a cistern. The rings, stained with blood, had been
+found under a big stone in the Valley of the Kings. They were the crude
+jewels which the Nubian nomads hammer out of shillings or two-franc
+pieces, I was told that Selim would certainly be hanged, because the
+little girl's mother refused the tendered blood-money. Now, the Khedive
+does not enjoy the prerogative of mercy, and the murderer, according to
+Moslem law, can redeem his life only if the parents of the victim
+consent to receive from him a sum of money as compensation. I was too
+busy to give thought to the matter. I could readily imagine that Selim,
+cunning but thoughtless, caressing yet unfeeling, had played with the
+little girl, torn off her ear-rings, killed her, and hidden her body.
+The affair soon passed out of my mind. The epidemic was spreading from
+Old Cairo to the European quarters. I was visiting from thirty to forty
+sick persons daily, practising venous injections in every case. I was
+suffering from liver trouble, anaemia was playing havoc with me, and I
+was dropping with fatigue. In order to husband my strength, I took a
+little rest at noon. I was accustomed, after luncheon, to lie down in
+the inner courtyard of my house, and there for an hour I bathed myself
+in the African shade, as dense and cool as water. One day, as I was
+lying there on a divan in my courtyard, just as I was lighting a
+cigarette, I saw Selim approaching. With his beautiful bronze arm he
+lifted the door-curtain, and came towards me in his blue robe. He did
+not speak, but smiled with his shy and innocent smile, and the deep red
+of his lips disclosed his dazzling teeth. His eyes, beneath the blue
+shadow of his eyelashes, shone with covetousness while gazing at my
+watch which lay on the table.
+
+"I thought he had escaped. And this surprised me, not because captives
+are strictly watched in Oriental prisons, where men, women, horses and
+dogs are herded in imperfectly closed courtyards, and guarded by a
+soldier armed with a stick. But Moslems are never tempted to flee from
+their fate. Selim knelt down with an appealing grace, and approached
+his lips to my hand, to kiss it according to ancient custom. I was not
+asleep, and I had proof of it. I also had proof that the apparition had
+been before me only for a short time. When Selim had vanished I noticed
+that my cigarette, which was alight, was not yet tipped with ash."
+
+"Was he dead when you saw him?" asked Nanteuil.
+
+"Not a bit of it," replied the doctor, "I heard a few days later that
+Selim, in his jail, wove little baskets, or played for hours at a time
+with a chaplet of glass balls, and that he would smilingly beg a piastre
+of European visitors, who were surprised by the caressing softness of
+his eyes. Moslem justice is slow. He was hanged six months later. No
+one, not even he himself, was greatly concerned about it. I was in
+Europe at the time."
+
+"And since then he has never reappeared?"
+
+"Never."
+
+Nanteuil looked at him, disappointed.
+
+"I thought he had come when he was dead. But since he was in prison you
+certainly could not have seen him in your house. You only thought you
+saw him."
+
+The physician, understanding what was in Felicie's mind, quickly replied:
+
+"My dear little Nanteuil, believe what I tell you. The phantoms of the
+dead have no more reality than the phantoms of the living."
+
+Without attending to what he was saying, she asked him if it was really
+because he suffered from his liver that he had a vision. He replied that
+he believed that the bad state of his digestive organs, general fatigue,
+and a tendency to congestion, had all predisposed him to behold an
+apparition.
+
+"There was; I believe," he added, "a more immediate cause. Stretched
+out on my divan, my head was very low. I raised it to light a cigarette,
+and let it fall back immediately. This attitude is particularly
+favourable to hallucinations. It is sometimes enough to lie down with
+one's head thrown back to see and to hear imaginary shapes and sounds.
+That is why I advise you, my child, to sleep with a bolster and a fat
+pillow."
+
+She began to laugh.
+
+"As mamma does--majestically!"
+
+Then, flitting off to another idea:
+
+"Tell me; Socrates, how comes it that you saw this sordid individual
+rather than another? You had hired a donkey from him, and you were no
+longer thinking of him. And yet he came. Say what you like, it's queer."
+
+"You ask me why it was he rather than another? It would be very hard for
+me to tell you. Our visions, bound up with our innermost thoughts,
+often present their images to us; sometimes there is no connection
+between them, and they show us an unexpected figure."
+
+He once more exhorted her not to allow herself to be frightened by
+phantoms.
+
+"The dead do not return. When one of them appears to you, rest assured
+that what you see is a thing imagined by your brain."
+
+"Can you," she inquired; "guarantee that there is nothing after death?"
+
+"My child, there is nothing after death that could frighten you."
+
+She rose, picked up her little bag and her part, and held out her hand
+to the doctor, saying:
+
+"As for you, you don't believe in anything, do you, old Socrates?"
+
+He detained her for a moment in the waiting-room, warned her to take
+good care of herself, to lead a quiet, restful life, and to take
+sufficient rest.
+
+"Do you suppose that is easy in our profession? To-morrow I have a
+rehearsal in the green-room, and one on the stage, and I have to try on
+a gown, while to-night I am acting. For more than a year now I've been
+leading that sort of life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Under the great void reserved by the height of the roof for the upward
+flight of prayers the motley crowd of human beings was huddled together
+like a flock of sheep.
+
+They were all there, at the foot of the catafalque surrounded by lights
+and covered with flowers, Durville, old Maury, Delage, Vicar, Destree,
+Leon Clim, Valrosche, Aman, Regnard, Pradel, Romilly, and Marchegeay,
+the manager. They were all there, Madame Ravaud, Madame Doulce, Ellen
+Midi, Duvernet, Herschell, Falempin, Stella, Marie-Claire, Louise Dalle,
+Fagette, Nanteuil, kneeling, robed in black, like elegiac figures. Some
+of the women were reading their missals. Some were weeping. All of them
+brought to the coffin of their comrade at least the tribute of their
+heavy eyes and their faces pallid from the cold of the morning.
+Journalists, actors, playwrights, whole families of those artisans who
+gain their living by the theatre, and a crowd of curious onlookers
+filled the nave.
+
+The choristers were uttering the mournful cries of the _Kyrie eleison_;
+the priest kissed the altar; turned towards the people and said:
+
+_"Dominus vobiscum."_
+
+Romilly; taking in the crowd at a glance, remarked
+
+"Chevalier has a full house."
+
+"Just look at that Louise Dalle," said Fagette. "To look as though she's
+in mourning, she has put on a black mackintosh!"
+
+A little to the back of the church, with Pradel and Constantin Marc, Dr.
+Trublet was, in subdued tones, according to his habit, delivering his
+moral homilies.
+
+"Observe," he said, "that they are lighting, on the altar and about the
+coffin, in the guise of wax candles, diminutive night-lights mounted on
+billiard cues, and are thereby making an offering of lamp oil instead of
+virgin wax to the Lord. The pious men who dwell in the sanctuary have at
+all times been proved to defraud their God by these little deceptions.
+This observation is not my own; it is, I believe, Renan's."
+
+The celebrant, standing on the epistle side of the altar, was reciting
+in a low voice:
+
+_"Nolumus autem vos ignorare fratres de dormientibus, ut non
+contrisemimi, sicut et caeteri qui spem non habent."_
+
+"Who is taking the part of Florentin?" inquired Durville of Romilly.
+
+"Regnard: he'll be no worse in it than Chevalier."
+
+Pradel plucked Trublet by the sleeve, and said:
+
+"Dr. Socrates, I beg you to tell me whether as a scientific man, as a
+physiologist, you see any serious objections to the immortality of the
+soul?"
+
+He asked the question as a busy and practical man in need of personal
+information.
+
+"You are doubtless aware, my dear friend," replied Trublet, "what
+Cyrano's bird said on this very subject. One day Cyrano de Bergerac
+heard two birds conversing in a tree. One of them said, 'The souls of
+birds are immortal,' 'There can be no doubt of it,' replied the other.
+'But it is inconceivable that beings who possess neither bill nor
+feathers, who have no wings and walk on two legs, should believe that
+they, like the birds, have an immortal soul.'"
+
+"All the same," said Pradel, "when I hear the organ, I am chock-full of
+religious ideas."
+
+_"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine."_
+
+The celebrated author of _La Nuit du 23 octobre 1812_ appeared in the
+church, and no sooner had he done so than he was everywhere at one and
+the same moment--in the nave, under the porch, and in the choir. Like
+the _Diable boiteux_ he must, bestriding his crutch, have soared above
+the heads of the congregation, to pass as he did in the twinkling of an
+eye from Morlot, the deputy, who, being a freethinker, had remained in
+the parvis, to Marie-Claire kneeling at the foot of the catafalque.
+
+At one and at the same moment he whispered into the ears of all a few
+nimble phrases:
+
+"Pradel, can you imagine this fellow going and chucking his part, an
+excellent part, and running off to kill himself? A pumpkin-headed fool!
+Blows out his brains just two days before the first night. Compels us to
+replace him and sets us back a week. What an imbecile! A rotten bad egg.
+But we must do him justice; he could jump, and jump well, the animal.
+Well, my dear Romilly, we rehearse the new man to-day at two o'clock.
+See to it that Regnard has the script of his part, and that he knows how
+to climb on to the roof. Let us hope he won't kick the bucket on our
+hands like Chevalier. What if he, too, were to commit suicide! You
+needn't laugh. There's an evil spell on certain parts. Thus, in my
+_Marino Falieri_, the gondolier Sandro breaks his arm at the dress
+rehearsal. I am given another Sandro. He sprains his ankle on the first
+night. I am given a third, he contracts typhoid fever. My little
+Nanteuil, I'll entrust you with a magnificent role to create when you get
+to the Francais. But I have sworn by the great gods that I'll never
+again have a single play performed in this theatre."
+
+And immediately, under the little door which shuts off the choir on the
+right hand side of the altar, showing his friends Racine's epitaph,
+which is let into the wall, like a Parisian thoroughly conversant with
+the antiquities of his city, he recalled the history of this stone, he
+told them how the poet had been buried in accordance with his desire at
+Port-Royal-des-Champs, at the foot of Monsieur Hamon's grave, and that,
+after the destruction of the abbey and the violation of the tombs, the
+body of Messire Jean Racine, the King's secretary, Groom of the Chamber,
+had been transferred, all unhonoured; to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. And he
+told how the tombstone, bearing the inscription composed for Boileau,
+beneath the knight's crest and the shield with its swan argent, and done
+into Latin by Monsieur Dodart, had served as a flagstone in the choir of
+the little church of Magny-Lessart; where it had been discovered in
+1808.
+
+"There it is," he added. "It was broken in six pieces and the name of
+Racine was effaced by the shoes of the peasants. The fragments were
+pieced together and the missing letters carved anew."
+
+On this subject he expatiated with his customary vivacity and
+diffusiveness, drawing from his prodigious memory a multitude of curious
+facts and amusing anecdotes, breathing life into history and endowing
+archaeology with a living interest. His admiration and his wrath burst
+forth in swift and violent alternation in the solemnity of the church,
+and amid the pomp of the ceremony.
+
+"I would give something to know, for instance, who were the stupid
+bunglers who set this stone in the wall. _Hic jacet nobilis vir Johannes
+Racine._ It is not true! They make honest Boileau's epitaph lie. The
+body of Racine is not in this spot. It was laid to rest in the third
+chapel on the left, as you enter. What idiots!" Then, suddenly calm, he
+pointed to Pascal's tombstone.
+
+"That came here from the museum of the Petits-Augustins. No praise can
+be too great for Lenoir, who, in the days of the Revolution, collected
+and preserved."
+
+Thereupon, he improvised a second lecture on lapidary archaeology, even
+more brilliant than the first, transformed the history of Pascal's life
+into a terrible yet amusing drama, and vanished. In all, he had remained
+in the church for the space of ten minutes.
+
+Over those heads full of worldly cares and profane desires the _Dies
+irae_ rumbled like a storm:
+
+  _"Mors stupebit et natura,
+  Quum resurget creatura
+  Judicanti responsura."_
+
+"Tell me, Dutil, how could that little Nanteuil, who is pretty and
+intelligent, get herself mixed up with a dirty mummer like Chevalier?"
+
+"Your ignorance of the feminine heart surprises me."
+
+"Herschell was prettier when she was a brunette."
+
+  _"Qui Mariam absolvisti
+  Et latronem exaudisti
+  Mihi quoque spem dedisti."_
+
+"I must be off to lunch."
+
+"Do you know anyone who knows the Minister?"
+
+"Durville is a has-been. He blows like a grampus."
+
+"Put me in a little paragraph about Marie Falempin. I can tell you she
+was simply delicious in _Les Trois Magots_."
+
+  _"Inter oves locum presta
+  Et ab haedis me sequestra,
+  Statuens in parte dextra."_
+
+"So then, it is for Nanteuil's sake that he blew out his brains? A
+little ninny who isn't worth spanking!"
+
+The celebrant poured the wine and the water into the chance, saying:
+
+_"Deus qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisu...."_
+
+"Is it really true, doctor, that he killed himself because Nanteuil
+wouldn't have any more to do with him?"
+
+"He killed himself," replied Trublet, "because she loved another. The
+obsession of genetic images frequently determines mania and
+melancholia."
+
+"You don't understand second-rate actors, Dr. Socrates," said Pradel. "He
+killed himself to cause a sensation, and for no other reason."
+
+"It's not only second-rate actors," said Constantin Marc, "who suffer
+from an uncontrollable desire to attract attention to themselves at
+whatever cost. Last year, in the place where I live, Saint-Bartholome,
+while a threshing-machine was at work, a thirteen-year-old boy shoved
+his arm into the gear; it was crushed up to the shoulder. The surgeon
+who amputated it asked him, as he was dressing the stump, why he
+mutilated himself like that. The boy confessed that it was to draw
+attention to himself."
+
+Meanwhile, Nanteuil, with dry eyes and pursed lips, had fixed her eyes
+upon the black cloth with which the catafalque was covered, and was
+impatiently waiting until enough holy water, candles and Latin prayers
+should be bestowed upon the dead man for him to depart in peace. She
+had seen him again the night before, and she thought he had returned
+because the priests had not yet bidden him to rest in peace. Then,
+reflecting that one day she, too, would die, and would, like him, be
+laid in a coffin, beneath a black pall, she shuddered with horror and
+closed her eyes. The idea of life was so strong within her that she
+pictured death as a hideous life. Afraid of death, she prayed for a long
+life. Kneeling, with bowed head, the voluptuous ashen cloud of her
+buoyant hair falling over her forehead, she, a profane penitent, was
+reading in her prayer-book words which reassured her, although she did
+not understand them.
+
+"Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful
+dead from the pains of hell and from the depths of the bottomless pit.
+Deliver them from the lion's jaws. Let them not be plunged into hell,
+and let them not fall into the outer darkness, but suffer that St.
+Michael, the Prince of Angels, lead them to the holy light promised by
+Thee to Abraham and to his posterity."
+
+At the Elevation of the Host the congregation, permeated by a vague
+impression that the mystery was becoming more sacred, ceased its private
+conversations, and assumed a certain appearance of reverent devotion.
+And as the organ fell silent all heads were bowed at the tinkling of a
+little bell which was shaken by a child. Then, after the last Gospel,
+when, the service being over, the priest, attended by his acolytes,
+approached the catafalque to the chanting of the _Libera_, a sense of
+relief was experienced by the crowd, and they began to jostle one
+another a little in order to file past the coffin. The women, whose
+piety, grief and contrition were contingent upon their immobility and
+their kneeling posture, were at once recalled to their customary frame
+of mind by the movement and the encounters of the procession. They
+exchanged amongst themselves and with the men remarks relating to their
+profession.
+
+"Do you know," said Ellen Midi to Falempin, "that Nanteuil is going to
+join the Comedie-Francaise?"
+
+"It's not possible!"
+
+"The contract is signed."
+
+"How did she manage it?"
+
+"Not by her acting, you may be sure," replied Ellen, who proceeded to
+relate a highly scandalous story.
+
+"Take care," said Falempin, "she is just behind you."
+
+"Yes, I see her! She's got a cheek of her own to show herself here,
+don't you think?"
+
+Marie-Claire whispered an extraordinary piece of news into Durville's
+ear:
+
+"They say he committed suicide. Well, there's not a word of truth in it
+He didn't commit suicide at all. And the proof of it is that he is being
+buried with the rites of the Church."
+
+"What then?" inquired Durville.
+
+"Monsieur de Ligny surprised him with Nanteuil and killed him."
+
+"Come, come!"
+
+"I can assure you that I am accurately informed."
+
+The conversations were becoming animated and familiar.
+
+"So you are here, you wicked old sinner!"
+
+"The box-office receipts are falling off already."
+
+"Stella has succeeded in getting herself proposed by seventeen Deputies,
+nine of whom are members of the Budget Commission."
+
+"Yet I told Herschell, 'That little Bocquet fellow isn't the man for you.
+What you need is a man of standing.'"
+
+When the bier, borne by the undertaker's men, passed through the west
+door, the delicious rays of a winter sun fell on the faces of the women
+and the roses lying on the coffin. Grouped on either side of the parvis,
+a few young men from the great colleges sought the faces of celebrities;
+the little factory girls from the neighbouring workshops, standing in
+couples with arms round each other's waists, contemplated the
+actresses' dresses. And standing against the porch on their aching feet,
+a couple of tramps, accustomed to living under the open sky, whether
+mild or sullen, slowly shifted their dejected gaze, while a college lad
+gazed with rapture at the fiery tresses which coiled like flames on the
+nape of Fagette's neck.
+
+She had stopped on the topmost step in front of the doors, and was
+chatting with Constantin Marc and a few journalists:
+
+"...Monsieur de Ligny? He danced attendance upon me long before he knew
+Nanteuil. He used to gaze upon me by the hour, with eager eyes, without
+daring to speak a word to me. I received him willingly enough, for his
+behaviour was perfect. It is only fair to say that his manners are
+excellent. He was as reserved as a man could be. At last, one day, he
+declared that he was madly in love with me. I told him that as he was
+speaking to me seriously I would do the same; that I was truly sorry to
+see him in such a state; that every time such a thing happened I was
+greatly upset by it; that I was a woman of standing, I had settled my
+life, and could do nothing for him. He was desperate. He informed me
+that he was leaving for Constantinople, that he would never return. He
+couldn't make up his mind either to remain or to go away. He fell ill.
+Nanteuil, who thought I loved him and wanted to keep him, did all in
+her power to get him away from me. She flung herself at his head in the
+craziest fashion, I found her sometimes a trifle ridiculous, but, as you
+may imagine, I did not place any obstacle in her path. For his part,
+Monsieur de Ligny, with the object of inspiring me with regret, with
+vexation, or what not, perhaps in the hope of making me jealous,
+responded very visibly to Nanteuil's advances. And that is how they came
+to be together. I was delighted. Nanteuil and I are the best of
+friends."
+
+Madame Doulce, hedged in on either side by the onlookers, came slowly
+down the steps, indulging herself in the illusion that the crowd was
+whispering, "That's Doulce!"
+
+She seized Nanteuil as she was passing, pressed her to her bosom, and
+with a beautiful gesture of Christian charity enveloped her in her
+mantle, saying through her sobs:
+
+"Try to pray, my child, and accept this medal. It has been blessed by
+the Pope. A Dominican Father gave it to me."
+
+Madame Nanteuil, who was a little out of breath, but was growing young
+again since she had renewed her experience of love, was the last to come
+out. Durville pressed her hand.
+
+"Poor Chevalier!" he murmured.
+
+"His was not a bad character," answered Madame Nanteuil, "but he showed
+a lack of tact. A man of the world does not commit suicide in such a
+manner. Poor boy, he had no breeding."
+
+The hearse began its journey in the colossal shadow of the Pantheon, and
+proceeded down the Rue Soufflet, which is lined on both sides with
+booksellers' shops. Chevalier's fellow-players, the employes of the
+theatre, the director, Dr. Socrates, Constantin Marc, a few journalists
+and a few inquisitive onlookers followed. The clergy and the actresses
+took their seats in the mourning coaches. Nanteuil, disregarding Madame
+Doulce's advice, followed with Fagette, in a hired coupe.
+
+The weather was fine. Behind the hearse the mourners were conversing in
+familiar fashion.
+
+"The cemetery is the devil of a way!"
+
+"Montparnasse? Half an hour at the outside."
+
+"Do you know Nanteuil is engaged at the Comedie-Francaise?"
+
+"Do we rehearse to-day?" Constantin Marc inquired of Romilly.
+
+"To be sure we do, at three o'clock, in the green-room. We shall
+rehearse till five. I am playing to-night; I am playing to-morrow; on
+Sunday I play both afternoon and evening. Work is never over for us
+actors; one is always beginning over again, always putting one's
+shoulder to the wheel."
+
+Adolphe Meunier, the poet, laying his hand on his shoulder said:
+
+"Everything going well, Romilly?"
+
+"How are you getting on yourself, Meunier? Always rolling the rock of
+Sisyphus. That would be nothing, but success does not depend on us
+alone. If the play is bad and falls flat, all that we have put into it,
+our work, our talent, a bit of our own life, collapses with it. And the
+number of 'frosts' I've seen! How often the play has fallen under me
+like an old hack, and has chucked me into the gutter! Ah, if one were
+punished only for one's own sins!"
+
+"My dear Romilly," replied Meunier sharply, "do you imagine that the
+fate of dramatic authors like myself does not depend as much upon the
+actors as upon ourselves? Do you think it never happens that actors, by
+their carelessness or clumsiness, ruin a work which was meant to reach
+the heights? And do not we also, like Caesar's legionary, become seized
+with dismay and anguish at the thought that our fate is not assured by
+our own valour, but that it depends on those who fight beside us?"
+
+"Such is life," observed Constantin Marc. "In every undertaking,
+everywhere and always, we pay for the faults of others."
+
+"That is only too true," resumed Meunier, who had just seen his lyric
+drama, _Pandolphe et Clarimonde_, come hopelessly to grief. "But the
+iniquity of it disgusts us."
+
+"It should not disgust us in the least," replied Constantin Marc. "There
+is a sacred law which governs the world, which we are forced to obey,
+which we are proud to worship. It is injustice, holy injustice, august
+injustice. It is everywhere blessed under the name of happiness,
+fortune, genius and grace. It is a weakness not to acknowledge it and to
+venerate it under its true name."
+
+"That's rather weird, what you have just said!" remarked the gentle
+Meunier.
+
+"Think it over," resumed Constantin Marc. "You, too, belong yourself to
+the party of injustice, for you are striving for distinction, and you
+very reasonably want to throttle your competitors, a natural, unjust and
+legitimate desire. Do you know of anything more stupid or more odious
+than the sort of people we have seen demanding justice? Public opinion,
+which is not, however, remarkable for its intelligence, and common
+sense, which nevertheless is not a superior sense, have felt that they
+constituted the precise contrary of nature, society and life."
+
+"Quite so," said Meunier, "but justice----"
+
+"Justice is nothing but the dream of a few simpletons. Injustice is the
+thought of God Himself. The doctrine of original sin would alone
+suffice to make me a Christian, while the doctrine of grace embodies all
+truths divine and human."
+
+"Then are you a believer?" asked Romilly respectfully.
+
+"No, but I should like to be. I regard faith as the most precious
+possession which a man can enjoy in this world. At Saint-Bartholome, I
+go to Mass every Sunday and feast day, and I have never once listened to
+the exposition of the Gospel by the _cure_ without saying to myself: 'I
+would give all I possess, my house, my acres, my woods, to be as stupid
+as that animal there.'"
+
+Michel, the young painter with the mystic's beard, was saying to Roget,
+the scene painter:
+
+"That poor Chevalier was a man with ideas. But they were not all good
+ones. One evening, he walked into the _brasserie_ radiant and
+transfigured, sat himself beside us, and twirling his old felt hat
+between his long red fingers, he cried: 'I have discovered the true
+manner of acting tragedy. Hitherto no one has realized how to act
+tragedy, no one, you understand!' And he told us what his discovery was.
+'I've just come from the Chamber. They made me climb up to the
+amphitheatre. I could see the Deputies swarming like black insects at
+the bottom of a pit. Suddenly a stumpy little man mounted the tribune.
+He looked as if he were carrying a sack of coals on his back. He threw
+out his arms and clenched his fists. By Jove, he was comical! He had a
+Southern accent, and his delivery was full of defects. He spoke of the
+workers, of the proletariat, of social justice. It was magnificent; his
+voice, his gestures gripped one's very bowels; the applause nearly
+brought the house down. I said to myself "What he is doing, I'll do on
+the stage, and I'll do it better. I, a comic actor, will play tragedy.
+Great tragedy parts, if they are to produce their true effect, ought to
+be played by a comedian, but he must have a soul."' The poor fellow
+actually thought that he had imagined a new form of art. 'You'll see,'
+he said."
+
+At the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, a journalist came up to
+Meunier, and asked him:
+
+"Is it true that Robert de Ligny was at one time madly in love with
+Fagette?"
+
+"If he's in love with her, he hasn't been so long. Only a fortnight ago
+he asked me, in the theatre, 'Who is that little fair-haired woman?' and
+he pointed to Fagette."
+
+"I cannot understand," said the chronicler of an evening paper to a
+chronicler of a morning paper, "what can be the origin of our mania for
+calumniating humanity. I am amazed, on the other hand, by the number of
+decent people I come across. It is enough to make one incline to the
+belief that men are ashamed of the good they do, and that they conceal
+themselves when performing acts of devotion and generosity. Don't you
+think that is so?"
+
+"As far as I am concerned," replied the chronicler of the morning paper,
+"every time I have opened a door by mistake--I mean this both literally
+and metaphorically--I have always come across some unsuspected baseness.
+Were society suddenly turned inside out like a glove, so that one could
+see the inside, we should all faint away with horror and disgust."
+
+"Some time ago," said Roger to the painter Michel, "I used to know
+Chevalier's uncle on the Butte de Montmartre. He was a photographer who
+dressed like an astrologer. A crazy old fellow, always sending one
+customer the portrait of another. The customers used to complain. But
+not all of them. There were even some who thought the portraits were a
+good likeness."
+
+"What has become of him?"
+
+"He went bankrupt and hanged himself."
+
+In the Boulevard Saint-Michel Pradel, who was walking beside Trublet,
+was still profiting by the opportunity of obtaining information as to
+the immortality of the soul and the fate of man after death. He obtained
+nothing that seemed to him sufficiently positive and repeated:
+
+"I should like to know."
+
+To which Dr. Socrates replied:
+
+"Men were not made to know; men were not made to understand. They do not
+possess the necessary faculties. A man's brain is larger and richer in
+convolutions than that of a gorilla, but there is no essential
+difference between the two. Our highest thoughts and our most
+comprehensive systems will never be anything more than the magnificent
+extension of the ideas contained in the head of a monkey. We know more
+about the world than the dog does, and this flatters and entertains us;
+but it is very little in itself, and our illusions increase with our
+knowledge."
+
+But Pradel was not listening. He was mentally rehearsing the speech
+which he had to deliver at Chevalier's grave.
+
+When the funeral procession turned towards the shabby grass-plots which
+overflow the Avenue de l'Observatoire, the tram-cars, out of respect for
+the dead, made way for it.
+
+Trublet remarked upon this.
+
+"Men," he said, "respect death, since they rightly believe that, if it
+is respectable to die, every one is assured of being respectable in
+that, at least."
+
+The actors were excitedly discussing Chevalier's death. Durville,
+mysteriously, and in a deep voice, disclosed the tragedy:
+
+"It is not a case of suicide. It is a crime of passion. Monsieur de
+Ligny surprised Chevalier with Nanteuil. He fired seven revolver shots
+at him. Two bullets struck our unfortunate comrade in the head and the
+chest, four went wide, and the fifth grazed Nanteuil below the left
+breast."
+
+"Is Nanteuil wounded?"
+
+"Only slightly."
+
+"Will Monsieur de Ligny be arrested?"
+
+"The affair is to be hushed up, and rightly so. I have, however, the best
+authority for what I say."
+
+In the carriages, too, the actresses were engaged in spreading various
+reports. Some felt sure it was a case of murder; others, one of suicide.
+
+"He shot himself in the chest with a revolver," asserted Falempin. "But
+he only succeeded in wounding himself. The doctor said that if he had
+been attended to in time he might have been saved. But they left him
+lying on the floor, bathed in blood."
+
+And Madame Doulce said to Ellen Midi:
+
+"It has often been my fate to stand beside a deathbed. I always go down
+on my knees and pray. I at once feel myself invaded by a heavenly
+serenity."
+
+"You are indeed fortunate!" replied Ellen Midi.
+
+At the end of the Rue Campagne-Premiere, on the wide grey boulevards,
+they became conscious of the length of the road which they had covered,
+and the melancholy nature of the journey. They felt that while following
+the coffin they had crossed the confines of life, and were already in
+the country of the dead. On their right stretched the yards of the
+marble-workers, the florists' shops which supplied wreaths for funerals,
+displays of potted flowers, and the economical furniture of tombs, zinc
+flower-stands, wreaths of immortelles in cement, and guardian angels in
+plaster. On their left, they could see behind the low wall of the
+cemetery the white crosses rising among the bare tops of the lime-trees,
+and everywhere, in the wan dust, they breathed death, commonplace,
+uniform deaths under the administration of City and State, and poorly
+embellished by the pious hands of relations.
+
+They passed between two massive pillars of stone surmounted by winged
+hour-glasses. The hearse advanced slowly on the gravel which creaked in
+the silence. It seemed, amid the homes of the dead, to be twice as tall
+as before. The mourners read the famous names on some of the tombs, or
+gazed at the statue of a young girl, seated, book in hand. Old Maury
+deciphered, in the inscriptions, the age of the deceased. Short lives,
+and even more lives of average duration, distressed him as being of ill
+omen. But, when he encountered those of the dead who were notable for
+the length of their years, he joyfully drew from them the hope and
+probability of a long lease of life.
+
+The hearse stopped in the middle of a side alley. The clergy and the
+women stepped out of the coaches. Delage received in his arms, from the
+top of the carriage steps, the worthy Madame Ravaud, who was getting a
+little ponderous, and of a sudden, half in jest, half in earnest, he
+made certain proposals to her. She was no longer young, having been on
+the stage for half a century. Delage, with his twenty-five years, looked
+upon her as prodigiously old. Yet, as he whispered into her ear, he felt
+excited, infatuated, he became sincere, he really desired her, out of
+perverse curiosity, because he wanted to do something extraordinary, and
+was certain that he would be able to do it, perhaps because of his
+professional instinct as a handsome youth, and, lastly, because, in the
+first place having asked for what he did not want, he began to want what
+he had asked for. Madame Ravaud, indignant but flattered, made good her
+escape.
+
+The coffin was carried along a narrow path bordered with dwarf
+cypresses, amid a murmuring of prayers:
+
+_"In paradisum deducant te Angeli, in tuo adventu susciptant te Martyres
+et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem, Chorus Angelorum te
+suscipiat et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere, aeternam habeas requiem."_
+
+Soon there was no longer any visible path. It was necessary, in
+following the quickly vanishing coffin, the priests and the choristers,
+to scatter, striding over the recumbent tombstones, and slipping between
+the broken columns and upright slabs. They lost the coffin and found it
+again. Nanteuil evinced a certain eagerness in her pursuit of it,
+anxious and abrupt, her prayer-book in her hand, freeing her skirt as it
+caught on the railings, and brushing past the withered wreaths which
+left the heads of immortelles adhering to her gown. Finally, the first
+to reach the graveside smelt the acrid odour of the freshly turned soil,
+and from the heights of the neighbouring flagstones saw the grave into
+which the coffin was being lowered.
+
+The actors had contributed liberally to the expenses of the funeral;
+they had clubbed together to buy for their comrade as much earth as he
+needed, two metres granted for five years. Romilly, on behalf of the
+actors of the Odeon, had paid the cemetery board 300 francs--to be
+exact, 301 fr. 80 centimes. He had even made plans for a monument, a
+broken stele with comedy masks suspended upon it. But no decision had
+been come to on this point.
+
+The celebrant blessed the open grave. And the priest and the boy
+choristers murmured the responses:
+
+"Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine."
+
+_"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."_
+
+_"Requiescat in pace."_
+
+_"Amen."_
+
+_"Anima ejus et animae omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam
+Dei, requiescant in pace."_
+
+_"Amen."_
+
+_"De profundis...."_
+
+Each one of those present came forward to sprinkle holy water on the
+coffin. Nanteuil stood watching it all, the prayers, the spadefuls of
+earth, the sprinkling; then, kneeling apart on the corner of a tomb, she
+fervently recited "Our Father who art in heaven...."
+
+Pradel spoke at the graveside. He refrained from making a speech. But
+the Theatre de l'Odeon could not allow a young artist beloved of all to
+depart without a word of farewell.
+
+"I shall speak therefore, in the name of the great and true-hearted
+dramatic family, the words that are in every bosom."
+
+Grouped about the speaker in studied attitudes, the actors listened with
+profound knowledge. They listened actively, with their ears, lips, eyes,
+arms, and legs. Each listened in his own manner, with nobility,
+simplicity, grief or rebelliousness, according to the parts which the
+actor was accustomed to play.
+
+No, the director of the theatre would not suffer the valiant actor, who,
+in the course of his only too brief career, had shown more than
+promise, to depart without a word of farewell.
+
+"Chevalier, impetuous, uneven, restless, imparted to his creations an
+individual character, a distinctive physiognomy. We saw him a very few
+days ago--a few hours ago, I might say--bring an episodical character
+into powerful relief. The author of the play was struck by the
+performance. Chevalier was on the verge of success. The sacred flame was
+his. There are those who have asked, what was the cause of so cruel an
+end? Let us not seek for that cause. Chevalier died of his art; he died
+of dramatic fever. He died consumed by the flame which is slowly
+consuming all of us. Alas, the stage, of which the public sees only the
+smiles, and the tears, as sweet as the smiles, is a jealous master which
+demands of its servants an absolute devotion and the most painful
+sacrifices, and, at times, claims its victims. In the name of all your
+comrades, farewell, Chevalier, farewell!"
+
+The handkerchiefs were at work, wiping away the mourners' tears. The
+actors were weeping with all sincerity; they were weeping for
+themselves.
+
+After they had slipped away, Dr. Trublet, left alone in the cemetery
+with Constantin Marc, took in the multitude of graves with a glance.
+
+"Do you remember," he said, "one of Auguste Comte's reflections:
+'Humanity is composed of the dead and the living. The dead are by far
+the more numerous.' Assuredly, the dead are by far the more numerous. By
+the multitudinous numbers and the magnitude of their work, they are more
+powerful. It's they who rule; we obey them. Our masters lie beneath
+these stones. Here is the lawgiver who made the law to which I submit
+to-day; the architect who built my house, the poet who created the
+illusions which still disturb us; the orator who swayed us before our
+birth. Here are all the artisans of our knowledge, true or false, of our
+wisdom and of our follies. There they lie, the inexorable leaders, whom
+we dare not disobey. In them dwells strength, continuity, and duration.
+What does a generation of living folk amount to, in comparison with the
+numberless generations of the dead? What is our will of a day before the
+will of a thousand centuries? Can we rebel against them? Why, we have
+not even time to disobey them!"
+
+"At last you are coming to the point, Dr. Socrates!" said Constantin
+Marc. "You renounce progress, the new justice, the peace of the world,
+freedom of thought; you submit to tradition. You consent to the ancient
+error, the good old-fashioned ignorance, the venerable iniquity of our
+forbears. You withdraw into the French tradition, you submit to ancient
+custom, to the authority of our ancestors."
+
+"Whence do you obtain custom and tradition?" asked Trablet. "Whence do
+you receive authority? There are irreconcilable traditions, diverse
+customs; and opposed authorities. The dead do not impose any one will
+upon us. They subject us to contradictory wills. The opinions of the
+past which weigh upon us are uncertain and confused. In crushing us they
+destroy one another. All these dead have lived, like ourselves, in the
+midst of disorder and contradiction. Each in his time, in his own
+fashion, in hatred or in love, has dreamed the dream of life. Let us in
+our turn dream this dream with kindness and joy, if it be possible, and
+let us go to lunch. I am taking you to a little tavern in the Rue Vavin,
+kept by Clemence, who cooks only one dish, but a marvellous one at that,
+the Castelnaudary _cassoulet_, not to be confused with the _cassoulet_
+prepared in the Carcassonne fashion, which is merely a leg of mutton
+with haricot beans. The _cassoulet_ of Castelnaudary comprises pickled
+goose legs, haricot beans that have been previously bleached, bacon, and
+a small sausage. To be good, it must be cooked for a long time over a
+slow fire. Clemence's _cassoulet_ has been cooking for twenty years.
+From time to time she puts in the saucepan, now a little bit of goose or
+bacon, now a sausage or some haricots, but it is always the same
+_cassoulet_. The stock remains, and this ancient and precious stock
+gives it the flavour which, in the pictures of the old Venetian masters,
+one finds in the amber-coloured flesh of the women. Come, I want you to
+taste Clemence's _cassoulet_."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Having said her prayer, Nanteuil, without waiting to hear Pradel's
+speech, jumped into a carriage in order to join Robert de Ligny, who was
+waiting for her in front of the Montparnasse railway station. Amid the
+throng of passers-by they shook hands, gazing at one another without a
+word. More than ever did they feel that they were bound together. Robert
+loved her.
+
+He loved her without knowing it. She was for him, or so he believed,
+merely one delight in the infinite series of possible delights. But
+delight had assumed for him the form of Felicie, and, had he reflected
+more deeply upon the innumerable women whom he promised himself in the
+vast remainder of his newly begun life, he would have recognized that
+now they were all Felicies. He might at least have realized that,
+without having any intention of being faithful to her, he did not dream
+of being unfaithful, and that since she had given herself to him he had
+not desired any other woman. But he did not realize it.
+
+On this occasion, however, standing in the bustling commonplace square,
+on seeing her no longer in the voluptuous shadow of night, nor under the
+caressing glimmer of the alcove which gave her naked form the delicious
+vagueness of a Milky Way, but in a harsh, diffused daylight, by the
+circumstantial illumination of a sunlight devoid of splendour and
+without shadows, which revealed beneath her veil her eyelids that were
+seared with tears, her pearly cheeks and roughened lips, he realized
+that he felt for this woman's flesh a profound and mysterious
+inclination.
+
+He did not question her. They exchanged only tender trivial phrases.
+And, as she was very hungry, he took her to lunch at a well-known
+_cabaret_ whose name shone in letters of gold on one of the old houses
+in the square. They had their meal served in the winter-garden, whose
+rockery, fountain, and solitary tree were multiplied by mirrors framed
+in a green trellis. When seated at the table, consulting the bill of
+fare, they conversed with less restraint than heretofore. He told her
+that the emotions and worries of the past three days had unstrung his
+nerves, but he no longer thought about it, and it would be absurd to
+worry about the matter any further. She spoke to him of her health,
+complaining that she could not sleep, save for a restless slumber full
+of dreams. But she did not tell him what she saw in those dreams, and
+she avoided speaking of the dead man. He asked her if she had not spent
+a tiring morning, and why she had gone to the cemetery, a useless
+proceeding.
+
+Incapable of explaining to him the depths of her soul, submissive to
+rites and propitiatory ceremonies and incantations, she shook her head
+as if to say:
+
+"Had to."
+
+While those lunching at the adjoining tables were finishing their meal,
+they talked for a long time, both in subdued tones, while waiting to be
+served.
+
+Robert had promised himself, had sworn indeed never to reproach Felicie
+for having had Chevalier for her lover, or even to ask her a single
+question in this connection. And yet, moved by some obscure resentment,
+by an ebullition of ill-temper or natural curiosity, and also because he
+loved her too deeply to control himself, he said to her, with bitterness
+in his voice:
+
+"You were on intimate terms with him, formerly."
+
+She was silent, and did not deny the fact. Not that she felt that it was
+henceforth useless to lie. On the contrary, she was in the habit of
+denying the obvious truth, and she had, of course, too much knowledge of
+men to be ignorant of the fact that, when in love, there is no lie,
+however clumsy, which they cannot believe if they wish to do so. But on
+this occasion, contrary to her nature and habit, she refrained from
+lying. She was afraid of offending the dead. She imagined that in
+denying him she would be doing him a wrong, depriving him of his share,
+angering him. She held her peace, fearing to see him come and rest his
+elbows on the table, with his fixed smile and the hole in his head, and
+to hear him say in his plaintive voice. "Felicie, you surely cannot have
+forgotten our little room, in the Rue des Martyrs?"
+
+What he had become, for her, since his death, she could not have said,
+so alien was it to her beliefs, so contrary to her reason, and so
+antiquated, ridiculous and obsolete did the words which would have
+expressed her feeling seem to her. But from some remote inherited
+instinct, or more likely from certain tales which she had heard in her
+childhood, she derived a confused idea that he was of the number of
+those dead who in the days of old were wont to torment the living, and
+were exorcised by the priests; for upon thinking of him she
+instinctively began to make the sign of the cross, and she checked
+herself only that she might not seem ridiculous.
+
+Ligny, seeing her melancholy and distracted, blamed himself for his
+harsh and useless words, while at the very moment of reproaching
+himself for them he followed them by others equally harsh and equally
+useless.
+
+"And yet you told me it was not true!"
+
+She replied, fervently:
+
+"Because, don't you see, I wanted it not to be true."
+
+She added:
+
+"Oh, my darling, since I've been yours, I swear to you that I've not
+belonged to anyone else. I don't claim any merit for this; I should have
+found it impossible."
+
+Like the young of animals, she had need of gaiety. The wine, which shone
+in her glass like liquid amber, was a joy to her eyes, and she moistened
+her tongue with it with luxurious pleasure. She took an interest in the
+dishes set before her, and especially in the _pommes de terre
+soufflees_, like golden blisters. Next she watched the people lunching
+at the tables in the dining-room, attributing to them, according to
+their appearance, ridiculous opinions or grotesque passions. She noticed
+the ill-natured glances which the women directed toward her, and the
+efforts of the men to appear handsome and important. And she gave
+utterance to a general reflection:
+
+"Robert, have you noticed that people are never natural? They do not say
+a thing because they think it. They say it because they think it is
+what they ought to say. This habit makes them very wearisome. And it is
+extremely rare to find anyone who is natural. You, you are natural."
+
+"Well, I don't think I'm guilty of posing."
+
+"You pose like the rest. But you pose in your own character. I can see
+perfectly well when you are trying to surprise and impress me."
+
+She spoke to him of himself and, led back by an involuntary train of
+thought to the tragedy enacted at Neuilly, she inquired:
+
+"Did your mother say anything to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Yet she must have known."
+
+"It is probable."
+
+"Are you on good terms with her?"
+
+"Why, yes!"
+
+"They say she is still very beautiful, your mother, is it so?"
+
+He did not answer her and sought to change the conversation. He did not
+like Felicie to speak to him of his mother, or to turn her attention to
+his family. Monsieur and Madame de Ligny enjoyed the highest
+consideration in Parisian society. Monsieur de Ligny, a diplomatist by
+birth and by profession, was in himself a person worthy of the greatest
+consideration. He was so even before his birth, by virtue of the
+diplomatic services which his ancestors had rendered to France. His
+great-grandfather had signed the surrender of Pondicherry to England.
+Madame de Ligny lived with her husband on the most correct terms. But,
+although she had no money of her own, she lived in great style, and her
+gowns were one of the greatest glories of France. She received intimate
+visits from an ex-Ambassador. His age, his position, his opinions, his
+titles, and his great fortune made the connection respectable. Madame de
+Ligny kept the ladies of the Republic at arm's length, and, when the
+spirit moved her, gave them lessons in decorum. She had nothing to fear
+from the opinion of the fashionable world. Robert knew that she was
+looked upon with respect by people in society. But he was continually
+dreading that, in speaking of her, Felicie might fail to do so with all
+the needful reserve. He feared lest, not being in society, she might say
+that which had better have been left unsaid. He was wrong; Felicie knew
+nothing of the private life of Madame de Ligny; moreover, had she known
+of it, she would not have blamed her. The lady inspired her with a naive
+curiosity and an admiration mingled with fear. Since her lover was
+unwilling to speak to her of his mother, she attributed his reserve to a
+certain aristocratic arrogance, even to a lack of consideration, for
+her, at which the pride of the freewoman and the plebeian was up in
+arms. She was wont to say to him tartly:
+
+"I'm perfectly free to speak of your mother." The first time she had
+added: "Mine is just as good as yours." But she had realized that the
+remark was vulgar, and she had not repeated it.
+
+The dining-room was now empty. She looked at her watch, and saw that it
+was three o'clock.
+
+"I must be off," she said. "_La Grille_ is being rehearsed this
+afternoon. Constantin Marc ought to be at the theatre already. There's
+another queer fellow for you! He boasts that when he's in the Vivarais
+he ruins all the women. And yet he is so shy that he daren't even talk
+to Fagette and Falempin. I frighten him. It amuses me."
+
+She was so tired that she had not the courage to rise.
+
+"Isn't it queer? They are saying everywhere that I'm engaged for the
+Francais, it's not true. There's not even a question of it. Of course, I
+can't remain indefinitely where I am. In the long run one would get
+besotted there. But there is no hurry. I have a great part to create in
+_La Grille_. We shall see after that. What I want is to play comedy. I
+don't want to join the Francais and then to do nothing."
+
+Suddenly, gazing in front of her with eyes full of terror, she flung
+herself backwards, turned pale, and uttered a shrill scream. Then her
+eyelids fluttered, and she murmured that she could not breathe.
+
+Robert loosened her jacket, and moistened her temples with a little
+water.
+
+She spoke.
+
+"A priest! I saw a priest. He was in his surplice. His lips were moving,
+but no sound came from them. He looked at me."
+
+He tried to comfort her.
+
+"Come now, my darling, how can you suppose that a priest, a priest in
+his surplice, would show himself in a restaurant?"
+
+She listened obediently, and allowed herself to be persuaded.
+
+"You are right, you are right, I know it well enough."
+
+In that little head of hers illusions were soon dispelled. She was born
+two hundred and thirty years after the death of Descartes, of whom she
+had never heard; yet, as Dr. Socrates would have said, he had taught her
+the use of reason.
+
+Robert met her at six o'clock after the rehearsal, under the arcades of
+the Odeon, and drove away with her in a cab.
+
+"Where are we going?" she inquired.
+
+He hesitated a little.
+
+"You would not care to go back to our house out there?"
+
+She cried out at the suggestion.
+
+"Oh no! I couldn't! Oh, heavens, never!"
+
+He replied that he had thought as much; that he would try to find
+something else: a little ground-floor flat in Paris; that in the
+meantime, just for to-day, they would content themselves with a chance
+abode.
+
+She gazed at him with fixed, heavy eyes, drew him violently towards her,
+scorching his neck and ear with the breath of her desire. Then her arms
+fell away from him, and she sank back beside him, dejected and relaxed.
+
+When the cab stopped, she said:
+
+"You will not be vexed with me, will you, my own Robert, at what I am
+going to say? Not to-day--to-morrow."
+
+She had considered it necessary to make this sacrifice to the jealous
+dead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+On the following day, he took her to a furnished room, commonplace but
+cheerful, which he had selected on the first floor of a house facing the
+square, near the Bibliotheque Nationale. In the centre of the square
+stood the basin of a fountain, supported by lusty nymphs. The paths,
+bordered with laurel and spindlewood, were deserted, and from this
+little-frequented spot one heard the vast and reassuring hum of the
+city. The rehearsal had finished very late. When they entered the room
+the night, already slower to arrive in this season of melting snow, was
+beginning to cast its gloom over the hangings. The large mirrors of the
+wardrobe and overmantel were filling with vague lights and shadows. She
+took off her fur coat, went to look out of the window between the
+curtains and said:
+
+"Robert, the steps are wet."
+
+He answered that there was no flight of steps, only the pavement and the
+road, and then another pavement and the railings of the square.
+
+"You are a Parisian, you know this square well. In the centre, among the
+trees, there is a monumental fountain, with enormous women whose breasts
+are not as pretty as yours."
+
+In his impatience he helped her to undo her cloth frock; but he could
+not find the hooks, and scratched himself with the pins.
+
+"I am clumsy," he said.
+
+She retorted laughingly:
+
+"You are certainly not so clever as Madame Michon! It's not so much
+clumsiness, but you are afraid of getting pricked. Men are a cowardly
+race. As for women, they have to accustom themselves to suffer. It's
+true: to be a woman is to be nearly always ailing."
+
+He did not notice that she was pale, with dark rings round her eyes. He
+desired her so ardently; he no longer saw her.
+
+"They are very sensitive to pain," he said, "but they are also very
+sensitive to pleasure. Do you know Claude Bernard?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He was a great scientist. He said that he didn't hesitate to recognize
+woman's supremacy in the domain of physical and moral sensibility."
+
+Nantueil; unhooking her stays, replied:
+
+"If he meant by that that all women are sensitive, he was indeed an old
+greenhorn. He ought to have seen Fagette; he would soon have discovered
+whether it was easy to get anything out of her in the domain--how did he
+express it?--of physical and moral sensibility."
+
+And she added with gentle pride:
+
+"Don't you make any mistake, Robert, there's not such a heap of women
+like myself."
+
+As he was drawing her into his arms, she released herself.
+
+"You are hindering me."
+
+Sitting down and doubling herself up in order to undo her boots, she
+continued.
+
+"Do you know, Dr. Socrates told me the other day that he had seen an
+apparition. He saw a donkey-boy who had murdered a little girl. I dreamt
+of the story last night, only in my dream I could not make out whether
+the donkey-boy was a man or a woman. What a mix-up the dream was!
+Talking of Dr. Socrates, just guess whose lover he is--why, the lady who
+keeps the circulating library in the Rue Mazarine. She is no longer very
+young, but she is very intelligent. Do you think he is faithful to her?
+I'll take off my stockings, it's more becoming."
+
+And she went on to tell him a story of the theatre:
+
+"I really don't think I shall remain at the Odeon much longer."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You'll see. Pradel said to me to-day, before rehearsal 'My dear little
+Nanteuil, there has never been anything between us. It is ridiculous.'
+He was extremely decorous, but he gave me to understand that we were in
+a false position with regard to one another, which could not go on
+indefinitely. You must know that Pradel has established a rule. Formerly
+he used to pick and choose among his _pensionnaires_. He had favourites,
+and that caused an outcry. Nowadays, for the better administration of
+the theatre, he takes them all, even those he has no liking for, even
+those who are distasteful to him. There are no more favourites.
+Everything goes splendidly. Ah, he's a director all through, is Pradel!"
+
+As Robert, in the bed, listened in silence, she went up to him and shook
+him:
+
+"Then it's all the same to you if I carry on with Pradel?"
+
+"No, my dear, it would not be all the same to me. But nothing I might
+say would prevent it."
+
+Bending over him, she caressed him ardently, pretending to threaten and
+to punish him; and she cried:
+
+"Then you don't really love me, that you are not jealous. I insist that
+you shall be jealous."
+
+Then, suddenly, she moved away from him, and hitching over her left
+shoulder her chemise, which had slipped down under her right breast, she
+loitered in front of the dressing-table and inquired uneasily:
+
+"Robert, you have not brought anything here from the other room?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Thereupon, softly, timidly, she slipped into the bed. But hardly had she
+lain down when she raised herself from the pillow on her elbow, and,
+craning her neck, listened with parted lips. It seemed to her that she
+could hear slight sounds of footsteps along the gravel path which she
+had heard in the house in the Boulevard de Villiers. She ran to the
+window; she saw the Judas tree, the lawn, the garden gate. Knowing what
+she was yet to see, she sought to hide her face in her hands, but she
+could not raise her arms, and Chevalier's face rose up before her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+She had returned home in a burning fever. Robert, after dining _en
+famille_, had retired to his attic. His nerves were on edge, and he was
+badly out of temper as a result of the manner in which Nanteuil had left
+him.
+
+His shirt and his clothes, laid out on the bed by his valet, seemed to
+be waiting for him in a domestic and obsequious attitude. He began to
+dress himself with a somewhat ill-tempered alacrity. He was impatient to
+leave the house. He opened his round window, listened to the murmur of
+the city, and saw above the roofs the glow which rose into the sky from
+the city of Paris. He scented from afar all the amorous flesh gathered,
+on this winter's night, in the theatres and the great _cabarets_, the
+cafe-concerts and the bars.
+
+Irritated by Felicie's denial of his desires, he had decided to satisfy
+them elsewhere, and as he was not conscious of any preference he
+believed that his only difficulty would be to make a choice; but he
+presently realized that he had no desire for any of the women of his
+acquaintance, nor did he even feel any desire for an unknown woman. He
+closed his window, and seated himself before the fire.
+
+It was a coke fire; Madame de Ligny, who wore cloaks costing a thousand
+pounds, was wont to economize in the matter of her table and her fires.
+She would not allow wood to be burned in her house.
+
+He reflected upon his own affairs, to which he had so far given little
+or no thought; upon the career he had embraced, and which he beheld
+obscurely before him. The Minister was a great friend of his family. A
+mountaineer of the Cevennes, brought up on chestnuts, his dazzled eyes
+blinked at the flower-bedecked tables of Paris. He was too shrewd and
+too wily not to retain his advantage over the old aristocracy, which
+welcomed him to its bosom: the advantage of harsh caprices and arrogant
+refusals. Ligny knew him, and expected no favours at his hands. In this
+respect he was more perspicacious than his mother, who credited herself
+with a certain power over the dark, hairy little man, whom every
+Thursday she engulfed in her majestic skirts on the way from the
+drawing-room to the dinner-table. He judged him to be disobliging. And
+then something had gone wrong between them. Robert, as ill luck would
+have it, had forestalled his Minister in his intimacy with a lady whom
+the latter loved to the verge of absurdity: Madame de Neuilles, a woman
+of easy virtue. And it seemed to him that the hairy little man suspected
+it, and regarded him with an unfriendly eye. And, lastly, the idea had
+grown upon him at the Quai d'Orsay that Ministers are neither able nor
+willing to do very much. But he did not exaggerate matters, and thought
+it quite possible that he might obtain a minor secretaryship. Such had
+been his wish hitherto. He was most anxious not to leave Paris. His
+mother, on the contrary, would have preferred that he should be sent to
+The Hague, where a post as third secretary was vacant. Now, of a sudden,
+he decided in favour of The Hague. "I'll go," he said. "The sooner the
+better." Having made up his mind, he reviewed his reasons. In the first
+place, it would be an excellent thing for his future career. Again, The
+Hague post was a pleasant one. A friend of his, who had held it, had
+enlarged upon the delightful hypocrisy of the sleepy little capital,
+where everything was engineered and "wangled" for the comfort of the
+Diplomatic Corps. He reflected, also, that The Hague was the august
+cradle of a new international law, and finally went so far as to invoke
+the argument that he would be giving pleasure to his mother. After which
+he realized that he wanted to leave home solely on account of Felicie.
+
+His thoughts of her were not benevolent. He knew her to be mendacious,
+timorous, and a malicious friend. He had proof that she was given to
+falling in love with actors of the lowest type, or, at all events, that
+she made shift with them. He was not certain that she did not deceive
+him, not that he had discovered anything suspect in the life which she
+was leading, but because he was properly distrustful of all women. He
+conjured up in his mind all the evil that he knew of her, and persuaded
+himself that she was a little jade, and, being conscious that he loved
+her, he believed that he loved her merely because of her extreme
+prettiness. This reason seemed to him a sound one; but on analysing it
+he perceived that it explained nothing; that he loved the girl not
+because she was exceedingly pretty, but because she was pretty in a
+certain uncommon fashion of her own; that he loved her for that which
+was incomparable and rare in her; because, in a word, she was a
+wonderful thing of art and voluptuousness, a living gem of priceless
+value. Thereupon, realizing how weak he was, he wept, mourning over his
+lost freedom, his captive mind, his disordered soul, the devotion of his
+very flesh and blood to a weak, perfidious little creature.
+
+He had scorched his eyes by gazing at the coke fire behind the bars of
+the grate. He closed them in pain and, under his closed eyes, he saw
+negroes leaping before him in an obscene and bloody riot. While he
+sought to remember from what book of travel, read in boyhood, these
+blacks emerged, he saw them diminish, resolve themselves into
+imperceptible specks, and disappear into a red Africa, which little by
+little came to represent the wound seen by the light of a match on the
+night of the suicide. He reflected.
+
+"That fool of a Chevalier! Why, I was scarcely thinking of the fellow!"
+
+Suddenly, against this background of blood and flame; appeared the
+slender form of Felicie, and he felt lurking within him a hot, cruel
+desire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+He went to see her the following day, in the little flat in the
+Boulevard Saint-Michel. He was not in the habit of going thither. He did
+not particularly care to meet Madame Nanteuil; she bored him and
+embarrassed him, although she was extremely polite to him, even to
+obsequiousness.
+
+It was she who received him in the little drawing-room. She thanked him
+for his interest in Felicie's health, and informed him that she had been
+restless and unwell the night before, but was now feeling better.
+
+"She is in her bedroom, working at her part. I will tell her that you
+are here. She will be very glad to see you, Monsieur de Ligny. She knows
+that you are very fond of her. And true friends are rare, especially in
+the theatrical world."
+
+Robert observed Madame Nanteuil with an attention which he had not
+hitherto bestowed upon her. He was trying to see in her face the face
+that would be her daughter's in years to come. When walking in the
+street he was fond of reading, in the faces of the mothers, the
+love-affairs of the daughters. And on this occasion he assiduously
+deciphered the features and the figure of this woman as an interesting
+prophecy. He discovered nothing either of bad or good augury. Madame
+Nanteuil, plump, fresh-complexioned, cool-skinned, was not unattractive
+with the sensuous fullness of her contours. But her daughter did not in
+the least resemble her.
+
+Seeing her so collected and serene, he said to her:
+
+"You yourself are not of a nervous temperament?"
+
+"I have never been nervous. My daughter does not take after me. She is
+the living image of her father. He was delicate, although his health was
+not bad. He died of a fall from his horse. You'll take a cup of tea,
+won't you, Monsieur de Ligny?"
+
+Felicie entered the room. Her hair was outspread upon her shoulders; she
+was wrapped in a white woollen dressing-gown, held very loosely at the
+waist by a heavy embroidered girdle, and she shuffled along in red
+slippers; she looked a mere child. The friend of the house, Tony Meyer,
+the picture dealer, was wont when he saw her in this garment, which was
+a trifle monkish in appearance, to call her Brother Ange de Charolais,
+because he had discovered in her a resemblance to a portrait by Nattier
+which represented Mademoiselle de Charolais in the Franciscan habit.
+Before this little girl, Robert was surprised and silent.
+
+"It's kind of you," she said, "to have come to inquire after me. I am
+better, thank you."
+
+"She works very hard; she works too hard," said Madame Nanteuil. "Her
+part in _La Grille_ is tiring her."
+
+"Oh no, mother."
+
+They spoke of the theatre, and the conversation languished.
+
+During a moment's silence, Madame Nanteuil asked Monsieur de Ligny if he
+were still collecting old fashion-prints.
+
+Felicie and Robert looked at her without understanding. They had told
+her not long before some fiction about engraved fashion-plates, to
+explain the meetings which they had not been able to conceal. But they
+had quite forgotten the fact. Since then, a piece of the moon, as an old
+author has said, had fallen into their love; Madame Nanteuil alone, in
+her profound respect for fiction, remembered it.
+
+"My daughter told me you had a great number of those old engravings and
+that she used to find ideas for her costumes in them."
+
+"Quite so, madame, quite so."
+
+"Come here, Monsieur de Ligny," said Felicie. "I want to show you a
+design for a costume for the part of Cecile de Rochemaure."
+
+And she carried him off to her room.
+
+It was a small room hung with flowered paper; the furniture consisted of
+a wardrobe with a mirror, a couple of chairs upholstered in horsehairs
+and an iron bedstead; with a white counterpane; above it was a bowl for
+holy water, and a sprig of boxwood.
+
+She gave him a long kiss on the mouth.
+
+"I do love you, do you know!"
+
+"Quite sure?"
+
+"Oh yes! And you?"
+
+"I too, I love you. I wouldn't have believed that I could love you so!"
+
+"Then it came afterwards."
+
+"It always comes afterwards."
+
+"That's true, what you've just said, Robert. Before--one doesn't know."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I was very ill yesterday."
+
+"Have you seen Trublet? What did he say?"
+
+"He told me that I needed rest, and quiet. My darling, we must be
+sensible for another fortnight. Do you mind?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"So do I. But what would you have?"
+
+He strolled round the room two or three times, looking into every
+corner. She watched him with some little uneasiness, dreading lest he
+should ask her questions about her poor jewels and her cheap trinkets,
+which were modest enough as presents, but she could not in every case
+explain how she came to receive them. One may say anything one pleases,
+of course, but one may contradict oneself, and get into trouble, and
+that assuredly is not worth while. She diverted his attention.
+
+"Robert, open my glove-box."
+
+"What have you got in your glove-box?"
+
+"The violets you gave me the first time. Darling, don't leave me! Don't
+go away. When I think that from one day to the next you may go to some
+foreign country, to London, to Constantinople, I feel crazy."
+
+He comforted her, telling her that there had been some thought of
+sending him to The Hague. But he was determined not to go; he would get
+himself attached to the Minister's staff.
+
+"You promise?"
+
+He gave the promise in all sincerity. And she became quite cheerful.
+
+Pointing to the little wardrobe with its looking-glass, she said:
+
+"Look, darling, it's there that I study my part. When you came, I was
+working over my scene in the fourth. I take advantage of being alone to
+try for the exact tone. I seek a broad, mellow effect. If I were to
+listen to Romilly I should mince my words, and the result would be
+wretched. I have to say. 'I do not fear you.' It's the great moment of
+the part. Do you know how Romilly would have me say: 'I do not fear
+you'? I'll show you, I am to raise my hand to my nose, open my fingers
+and speak one word to each finger separately, in a particular tone, with
+a special expression 'I, do, not, fear, you,' as if I were exhibiting
+marionettes! It's a wonder he does not ask me to put a little paper hat
+on every finger. Subtle, intellectual, isn't it?"
+
+Then, lifting her hair and uncovering her animated features, she said:
+
+"I'll show you how I do it."
+
+Suddenly transfigured, seeming of greater stature, she spoke the words
+with an air of ingenuous dignity and serene innocence:
+
+"No, sir, I do not fear you. Why should I fear you? You thought to
+ensnare me, and you have placed yourself at my mercy. You are a man of
+honour. Now that I am under the shelter of your roof, you shall tell me
+what you told Chevalier d'Amberre, your enemy, when he entered that
+gate. You shall tell me: 'You are in your own house; I am yours to
+command.'"
+
+She had the mysterious gift of changing her soul and her very face.
+Ligny was under the spell of this beautiful illusion.
+
+"You are marvellous!"
+
+"Listen, pussy-cat. I shall wear a big lawn bonnet with lappets, one
+above the other, on either side of my face. You see, in the play I am a
+young girl of the Revolution. And it is imperative that I should make
+people feel it. I must have the Revolution _in_ me, do you understand?"
+
+"Are you well up in the Revolution?"
+
+"Of course I am! I don't know the dates, to be sure. But I have the
+feeling of the period. For me, the Revolution means a bosom swelling
+with pride under a crossed neckerchief, knees enjoying full freedom in a
+striped petticoat, and a tiny blaze of colour on the cheek-bones. There
+you have it!"
+
+He asked her questions about the play, and he realized that she knew
+nothing about it. She, did not need to know anything about it. She
+divined, she found by instinct all that she needed from it.
+
+"At rehearsals, I never give them a hint as to any of my effects, I keep
+them all for the public. It will make Romilly tear his hair. How stupid
+they'll all look! Fagette, my dear, will make herself ill over it."
+
+She sat down on a little rickety chair. Her forehead, but a moment
+before as white as marble, was rosy; she had once more assumed her
+cheeky flapper's expression.
+
+He drew near to her, gazed into the fascinating grey of her eyes, and,
+as on the evening before, when he sat in front of his coke-fire, he
+reflected that she was untruthful and cowardly, and ill-natured toward
+her friends; but now the thought was tempered with indulgence. He
+reflected that she had love-affairs with actors of the lowest type, or
+that she at least made shift with them; but the thought was tempered
+with a gentle pity. He recalled all the evil that he knew of her, but
+without bitterness. He felt that he loved her, less because she was
+pretty than because she was pretty in her own fashion; in a word, that
+he loved her because she was a gem endowed with life, and an
+incomparable thing of art and voluptuousness. He looked into the
+fascinating grey of her eyes, into their pupils, where tiny astrological
+symbols seemed to float in a luminous tide. He gazed at her with a gaze
+so searching that she felt it pierce right through her. And, assured
+that he had seen right into her, she said to him, with her eyes on his,
+clasping his head between her two hands:
+
+"Oh yes! I'm a rotten little actress; but I love you, and I don't care a
+rap for money. And there aren't many as good as me. And you know it well
+enough."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+They met daily at the theatre, and they went for walks together.
+
+Nanteuil was playing almost every night, and was eagerly working at her
+part of Cecile. She was gradually recovering her peace of mind; her
+nights were less disturbed; she no longer made her mother hold her hand
+while she fell asleep and no longer found herself suffocating in
+nightmares. A fortnight went by in this fashion. Then, one morning,
+while sitting at her dressing-table, combing her hairs she bent her head
+toward the glass, as the weather was overcast, and she saw in it, not
+her own face, but the face of the dead man. A thread of blood was
+trickling from one corner of his mouth; he was smiling and gazing at
+her.
+
+Thereupon she decided to do what she thought would be the proper and
+efficacious thing. She took a cab and drove off to see him. Going down
+the Boulevard Saint-Michel she bought a bunch of roses at her florist's.
+She took them to him. She went down on her knees before the tiny black
+cross which marked the spot where they had laid him. She spoke to him,
+she begged him to be reasonable, to leave her in peace. She asked his
+forgiveness for having treated him formerly with harshness. People did
+not always understand one another in life. But now he ought to
+understand and forgive her. What good did it do to him to torment her?
+She asked no better than to retain a kindly memory of him. She would
+come and see him from time to time. But he must cease to persecute and
+frighten her.
+
+She sought to flatter and soothe him with gentle phrases.
+
+"I can understand that you wanted to revenge yourself. It was natural.
+But you are not wicked at heart. Don't be angry any more. Don't frighten
+me any more. Don't come to see me any more. I'll come to you; I'll come
+often. I'll bring you flowers."
+
+She longed to deceive him, to soothe him with lying promises, to say to
+him "Stay where you are; do not be restless any longer; stay where you
+are, and I swear to you that I will never again do anything to offend
+you; I promise to submit to your will." But she dared not lie over a
+grave, and she was sure that it would be useless, that the dead know
+everything.
+
+A little wearied, she continued awhile, more indolently, her prayers
+and supplications, and she realized that she no longer felt the horror
+with which the tombs had formerly inspired her; that she had no fear of
+the dead man. She sought the reason for this, and discovered that he did
+not frighten her because he was not there.
+
+And she mused:
+
+"He is not there; he is never there; he is everywhere except where they
+laid him. He is in the streets, in the houses, in the rooms."
+
+And she rose to her feet in despair, feeling sure that henceforth she
+would meet him everywhere except in the cemetery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+After a fortnight's patience Ligny urged her to resume their former
+intercourse. The period which she herself had fixed had elapsed. He
+would not wait any longer. She suffered as much as he did in refusing
+herself to him. But she dreaded to see the dead man return. She found
+lame excuses for postponing appointments; at last she confessed that she
+was afraid. He despised her for displaying so little common sense and
+courage. He no longer felt that she loved him, and he spoke harshly to
+her, but he pursued her incessantly with his desire.
+
+Bitter days and barren hours followed. As she no longer dared to seek
+the shelter of a roof in his company, they used to take a cab, and after
+driving for hours about the outskirts of the city they would alight in
+some gloomy avenue, wandering far down it under the bitter east wind,
+walking swiftly, as though chastised by the breath of an unseen wrath.
+
+Once, however, the weather was so mild that it filled them with its soft
+languor. Side by side they trod the deserted paths of the Bois de
+Boulogne. The buds, which were beginning to swell on the tips of the
+slender black branches, dyed the tree-tops violet under the rosy sky. To
+their left stretched the fields, dotted with clumps of leafless trees,
+and the houses of Auteuil were visible. Slowly driven coupes, with their
+elderly passengers, crawled along the road, and the wet-nurses pushed
+their perambulators. A motor-car broke the silence of the Bois with its
+humming.
+
+"Do you like those machines?" asked Felicie.
+
+"I find them convenient, that's all."
+
+It was true that he was no chauffeur. He had no taste for any kind of
+sport; he concerned himself only with women.
+
+Pointing to a cab which had just passed them, she exclaimed:
+
+"Robert, did you see?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Jeanne Perrin was in it with a woman."
+
+And, as he displayed a calm indifference, she added in a reproachful
+tone:
+
+"You are like Dr. Socrates. Do you think that sort of thing natural?"
+
+The lake slept, bright and serene, within its sombre walls of pines.
+They took the path to their right, which skirted the bank where the
+white geese and swans were preening their feathers. At their approach a
+flotilla of ducks, like living hulls, their necks curving like prows,
+set sail toward them.
+
+Felicie told them, in a regretful tone, that she had nothing to give
+them.
+
+"When I was little," she went on to say, "Papa used to take me out on
+Sundays to feed the animals. It was my reward for having learned my
+lessons well all the week. Papa used to delight in the country. He was
+fond of dog, horses, all animals in fact. He was very gentle and very
+clever. He used to work very hard. But life is difficult for an officer
+who has no money of his own. It grieved him sorely not to be able to do
+as the wealthy officers did, and then he didn't hit it off with Mamma.
+Papa's life was not a happy one. He was often wretched. He didn't talk
+much; but we two understood one another without speaking. He was very
+fond of me. Robert, dearest, later on, in the distant future, the very
+distant future, I shall have a tiny house in the country. And when you
+come there, my beloved, you will find me in a short skirt, throwing corn
+to my fowls."
+
+He asked her what gave her the idea of going on the stage.
+
+"I knew very well that I'd never find a husband, since I had no dowry.
+And from what I saw of my older girl friends, working at dress-making or
+in a telegraph office, I was not encouraged to follow in their steps.
+When I was quite a little girl I thought it would be nice to be an
+actress. I had once acted, at my boarding-school, in a little play, on
+St. Nicholas' Day. I thought it no end of a lark. The schoolmistress
+said I didn't act well, but that was because Mamma owed her for a whole
+term. From the time I was fifteen I began to think seriously about going
+on the stage. I entered the Conservatoire, I worked, I worked very hard.
+It's a back-breaking trade. But success brings rest."
+
+Opposite the chalet on the island they found the ferry-boat moored to
+the landing. Ligny jumped into it, pulling Felicie after him.
+
+"Those tall trees are lovely, even without leaves," she said. "But I
+thought the chalet was closed at this time of the year."
+
+The ferryman told them that, on fine winter days, people out for a walk
+liked to visit the island, because they could enjoy quiet there, and
+that he had only just ferried a couple of ladies across.
+
+A waiter, who was living amid the solitude of the island, brought them
+tea, in a rustic sitting-room, furnished with a couple of chairs, a
+table, a piano, and a sofa. The panelling was mildewed, the planks of
+the flooring had started. Felicie looked out of the window at the lawn
+and the tall trees.
+
+"What is that," she asked, "that big dark ball on the poplar?"
+
+"That's mistletoe, my pet."
+
+"One would think it was an animal rolled round the branch, gnawing at
+it. It isn't nice to look at."
+
+She rested her head on her lover's shoulder, saying in a languid tone:
+
+"I love you."
+
+He drew her down upon the sofa. She felt him, kneeling at her feet, his
+hands, clumsy with impatience, gliding over her, and she suffered his
+attempts, inert, discouraged, foreseeing that it was useless. Her ears
+were ringing like a little bell. The ringing ceased, and she heard; on
+her right, a strange, clear, glacial voice say. "I forbid you to belong
+to one another." It seemed to her that the voice spoke from above, in
+the glow of light, but she did not dare to turn her head. It was an
+unfamiliar voice. Involuntarily and despite herself she tried to
+remember his voice, and she realized that she had forgotten its sound,
+and that she could never again remember it. The thought came to her
+"Perhaps this is the voice he has now." Terrified, she swiftly pushed
+her skirt over her knees. But she refrained from crying out, and she did
+not speak of what she had just heard, lest she should be taken for a
+madwoman, and because she realized somehow that it was not real.
+
+Ligny drew away from her.
+
+"If you don't want anything more to do with me, say so honestly. I am
+not going to take you by force."
+
+Sitting upright, with her knees pressed together, she told him:
+
+"Whenever we are in a crowd, as long as there are people about us, I
+want you, I long for you, but as soon as we are by ourselves I am
+afraid."
+
+He replied by a cheap, spiteful sneer:
+
+"Ah, if you must have a public to stimulate you!"
+
+She rose, and returned to the window. A tear was running down her cheek.
+She wept for some time in silence. Suddenly she called to him:
+
+"Look there!"
+
+She pointed to Jeanne Perrin, who was strolling on the lawn with a young
+woman. Each had an arm about the other's waist; they were giving one
+another violets to smell, and were smiling.
+
+"See! That woman is happy; her mind at peace."
+
+And Jeanne Perrin, tasting the peace of long-established habits,
+strolled along satisfied and serene, without even betraying any pride in
+her strange preference.
+
+Felicie watched her with, an interest which she did not confess to
+herself, and envied her her serenity.
+
+"She's not afraid, that woman."
+
+"Let her be! What harm is she doing us?"
+
+And he caught her violently by the waist. She freed herself with a
+shudder. In the end, disappointed, frustrated, humiliated, he lost his
+temper, called her a silly fool, and swore that he would not stand her
+ridiculous way of treating him any longer.
+
+She made no reply, and once more she began to weep.
+
+Angered by her tears, he told her harshly:
+
+"Since you can no longer give me what I ask you, it is useless for us to
+meet any more. There is nothing more to be said between us. Besides, I
+see that you have ceased to love me. And you would admit, if for once
+you could speak the truth, that you have never loved anyone except that
+wretched second-rate actor."
+
+Then her anger exploded, and she moaned in despair:
+
+"Liar! Liar! That's an abominable thing to say. You see I'm crying, and
+you want to make me suffer more. You take advantage of the fact that I
+love you to make me miserable. It's cowardly. Well, no then, I don't
+love you any longer. Go away! I don't want to see you again. Go! But
+it's true--what are we doing like this? Are we going to spend our lives
+staring at each other like this, wild with each other, full of despair
+and rage? It is not my fault--I can't, I can't. Forgive me, darling, I
+love you, I worship you, I want you. Only drive him away. You are a man,
+you know what there is to do. Drive him away. You killed him, not I. It
+was you. Kill him altogether then--Oh God, I am going mad. I am going
+mad!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the following day, Ligny applied to be sent as Third Secretary to The
+Hague. He was appointed a week later, and left at once, without having
+seen Felicie again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Madam Nanteuil thought of nothing but her daughter's welfare. Her
+liaison with Tony Meyers the picture-dealer in the Rue de Clichy, left
+her with plenty of leisure and an unoccupied heart. She met at the
+theatre a Monsieur Bondois, a manufacturer of electrical apparatus; he
+was still young, superior to his trade, and extremely well-mannered. He
+was blessed with an amorous temperament and a bashful nature, and, as
+young and beautiful women frightened him, he had accustomed himself to
+desiring only women who were not young and beautiful. Madame Nanteuil
+was still a very pleasing woman. But one night when she was badly
+dressed, and did not look her best; he made her the offer of his
+affections. She accepted him as something of a help toward housekeeping,
+and so that her daughter should want for nothing. Her devotion brought
+her happiness. Monsieur Bondois loved her, and courted her most
+ardently. At the outset this surprised her; then it brought her
+happiness and peace of mind; it seemed to her natural and good to be
+loved, and she could not believe that her time for love was past when
+she was in receipt of proof to the contrary.
+
+She had always displayed a kindly disposition, an easy-going character,
+and an even temper. But never yet had she revealed in her home so happy
+a spirit and such gracious thoughtfulness. Kind to others, and to
+herself, always preserving, in the lapse of changeful hours, the smile
+that disclosed her beautiful teeth and brought the dimples into her
+plump cheeks, grateful to life for what it was giving her, blooming,
+expanding, overflowing, she was the joy and the youth of the house.
+
+While Madame Nanteuil conceived and gave expression to bright and
+cheerful ideas, Felicie was fast becoming gloomy, fretful, and sullen.
+Lines began to show in her pretty face; her voice assumed a grating
+quality. She had at once realized the position which Monsieur Bondois
+occupied in the household, and, whether she would have preferred her
+mother to live and breathe for her alone, whether her filial piety
+suffered because she was forced to respect her less, whether she envied
+her happiness, or whether she merely felt the distress which love
+affairs cause us when we are brought into too close contact with them,
+Felicie, more especially at meal-times, and every day, bitterly
+reproached Madame Nanteuil, in very pointed allusions, and in terms
+which were not precisely veiled, in respect of this new "friend of the
+family"; and for Monsieur Bondois himself, whenever she met him, she
+exhibited an expressive disgust and an unconcealed aversion. Madame
+Nanteuil was only moderately distressed by this, and she excused her
+daughter by reflecting that the young girl had as yet no experience of
+life. And Monsieur Bondois, whom Felicie inspired with a superhuman
+terror, strove to placate her by signs of respect and inconsiderable
+presents.
+
+She was violent because she was suffering. The letters which she
+received from The Hague inflamed her love, so that it was a pain to her.
+A prey to consuming visions, she was pining away. When she saw her
+absent friend too clearly her temples throbbed, her heart beat
+violently, and a dense increasing shadow would darken her mind. All the
+sensibility of her nerves, all the warmth of her blood, all the forces
+of her being flowed through her, sinking downwards, merging themselves
+in desire in the very depths of her flesh. At such times she had no
+other thought than to recover Ligny. It was Ligny that she wanted, only
+Ligny, and she herself was surprised at the disgust which she felt for
+all other men. For her instincts had not always been so exclusive. She
+told herself that she would go at once to Bondois, ask him for money,
+and take the train for The Hague. And she did not do it. What deterred
+her was not so much the idea of displeasing her lover, who would have
+looked upon such a journey as bad form, as the vague fear of awakening
+the slumbering shadow.
+
+That she had not seen since Ligny's departure. But perturbing things
+were happening, within her and around her. In the street she was
+followed by a water-spaniel, which appealed and vanished suddenly. One
+morning when she was in bed her mother told her "I am going to the
+dressmaker's," and went out. Two or three minutes later Felicie saw her
+come back into the room as if she had forgotten something. But the
+apparition advanced without a look at her, without a word, without a
+sounds and disappeared as it touched the bed.
+
+She had even more disturbing illusions. One Sunday, she was acting, in a
+matinee of _Athalie_, the part of young Zacharias. As she had very
+pretty legs she found the disguise not displeasing; she was glad also to
+show that she knew how verse should be spoken. But she noticed that in
+the orchestra stalls there was a priest wearing his cassock. It was not
+the first time that an ecclesiastic had been present at an afternoon
+performance of this tragedy drawn from the Scriptures. Nevertheless, it
+impressed her disagreeably. When she went on the stage she distinctly
+saw Louise Dalle, wearing the turban of Jehoshabeath; loading a revolver
+in front of the prompter's box. She had enough common sense and presence
+of mind to reject this absurd vision, which disappeared. But she spoke
+her first lines in an inaudible voice.
+
+She had burning pains in the stomach. She suffered from fits of
+suffocation, sometimes, without apparent cause, an unspeakable agony
+gripped her bowels, her heart beat madly and she feared that she must be
+dying.
+
+Dr Trublet attended her with watchful prudence. She often saw him at the
+theatre, and occasionally went to consult him at his old house in the
+Rue de Seine. She did not go through the waiting-room; the servant would
+show her at once into the little dining-room, where Arab potteries
+glinted in the shadows, and she was always the first to be shown in. One
+day Socrates succeeded in making her understand the manner in which
+images are formed in the brain, and how these images do not always
+correspond with external objects, or, at my rate, do not always
+correspond exactly.
+
+"Hallucinations," he added, "are more often than not merely false
+perceptions. One sees a thing, but one sees it badly, so that a
+feather-broom becomes a head of bristling locks, a red carnation is a
+beast's open mouth, and a chemise is a ghost in its winding-sheet.
+Insignificant errors."
+
+From these arguments she derived sufficient strength to despise and
+dispel her visions of cats and dogs, or of persons who were living, and
+well known to her. Yet she dreaded seeing the dead man again; and the
+mystic terrors nestling in the obscure crannies of her brain were more
+powerful than the demonstrations of science. It was useless to tell her
+that the dead never returned; she knew very well that they did.
+
+On this occasion Socrates once more advised her to find some
+distraction, to visit her friends, and by preference the more pleasant
+of her friends, and to avoid darkness and solitude, as her two most
+treacherous enemies.
+
+And he added this prescription:
+
+"Especially must you avoid persons and things which may be connected
+with the object of your visions."
+
+He did not see that this was impossible. Nor did Nanteuil.
+
+"Then you will cure me, dear old Socrates," she said, turning upon him
+her pretty grey eyes, full of entreaty.
+
+"You will cure yourself my child. You will cure yourself, because you
+are hard-working, sensible, and courageous. Yes, yes, you are timid and
+brave at the same time. You dread danger, but you have the courage to
+live. You will be cured, because you are not in sympathy with evil and
+suffering. You will be cured because you want to be cured."
+
+"You think then that one can be cured if one wills it?"
+
+"When one wills it in a certain profound, intimate fashion, when it is
+our cells that will it within us, when it is our unconscious self that
+wills it; when one wills it with the secret, abounding, absolute will of
+the sturdy tree that wills itself to grow green again in the spring."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+That same night, being unable to sleep, she turned over in her bed, and
+threw back the bed-clothes. She felt that sleep was still far off, that
+it would come with the first rays, full of dancing atoms of dust, with
+which morning pierces the chinks between the curtains. The night-light,
+with its tiny burning heart shining through its porcelain shade, gave
+her a mystic and familiar companionship. Felicie opened her eyes and at
+a glance drank in the white milky glimmer which brought her peace of
+mind. Then, closing them once more, she relapsed into the tumultuous
+weariness of insomnia. Now and again a few words of her part recurred to
+her memory, words to which she attached no meaning, yet which obsessed
+her: "Our days are what we make them." And her mind wearied itself by
+turning over and over some four or five ideas.
+
+"I must go to Madame Royaumont to-morrow, to try on my gown. Yesterday I
+went with Fagette to Jeanne Perrin's dressing-room; she was dressing,
+and she showed her hairy legs, as if she was proud of them. She's not
+ugly, Jeanne Perrin; indeed, she has a fine head; but it is her
+expression that I dislike. How does Madame Colbert make out that I owe
+her thirty-two francs? Fourteen and three are seventeen, and nine,
+twenty-six. I owe her only twenty-six francs. 'Our days are what we make
+them.' How hot I feel!"
+
+With one swift movement of her supple loins she turned over, and her
+bare arms opened to embrace the air as though it had been a cool, subtle
+body.
+
+"It seems a hundred years since Robert went away. It was cruel of him to
+leave me alone. I am sick with longing for him." And curled up in her
+bed, she recollected intently the hours when they held each other in a
+close embrace. She called him:
+
+"My pussy-cat! Little wolf!"
+
+And immediately the same train of thoughts began once more their
+fatiguing procession through her mind.
+
+"Our days are what we make them. Our days are what we make them. Our
+days....' Fourteen and three, seventeen, and nine, twenty-six. I could
+see quite plainly that Jeanne Perrin showed her long man's legs, dark
+with hair, on purpose. Is it true what they say, that Jeanne Perrin
+gives money to women? I must try my gown on at four o'clock to-morrow.
+There's one dreadful thing, Madame Royaumont never can put in the
+sleeves properly. How hot I am! Socrates is a good doctor. But he does
+sometimes amuse himself by making you feel a stupid fool."
+
+Suddenly she thought of Chevalier, and she seemed to feel an influence
+emanating from him which was gliding along the walls of her bedroom. It
+seemed to her that the glimmer of the night-light was dimmed by it. It
+was less than a shadow, and it filled her with alarm. The idea suddenly
+flashed through her mind that this subtle thing had its origin in the
+portraits of the dead man. She had not kept any of them in her bedroom.
+But there were still some in the flat, some that she had not torn up.
+She carefully reckoned them up, and discovered that there must still be
+three left: the first, when he was quite young, showed him against a
+cloudy background; another, laughing and at his ease, sitting astride of
+a chair; a third as Don Caesar de Bazan. In her hurry to destroy every
+vestige of them she sprang out of bed, lit a candle, and in her
+nightgown shuffled along in her slippers into the drawing-room, until
+she came to the rosewood table, surmounted by a phoenix palm. She pulled
+up the tablecloth and searched through the drawer. It contained
+card-counters, sockets for candles, a few scraps of wood detached from
+the furniture, two or three lustres belonging to the chandelier and a
+few photographs, among which she found only one of Chevalier, the
+earliest, showing him standing against a cloudy background.
+
+She searched for the other two in a little piece of Boule furniture
+which adorned the space between the windows, and on which were some
+Chinese lamps. Here slumbered lamp-globes of ground glass, lamp-shades,
+cut-glass goblets ornamented with gilt bronze, a match-stand in painted
+porcelain flanked by a child sleeping against a drum beside a dog, books
+whose bindings were detached, tattered musical scores, a couple of
+broken fans, a flute, and a small heap of carte-de-visite portraits.
+There she discovered a second Chevalier, the Don Caesar de Bazan. The
+third was not there. She asked herself in vain where it could have been
+hidden away. Fruitlessly she hunted through boxes, bowls, flowerpot
+holders, and the music davenport. And while she was eagerly searching
+for the portrait, it was growing in size and distinctness in her
+imagination, attaining to a man's stature, was assuming a mocking air
+and defying her. Her head was on fire, her feet were like ice, and she
+could feel terror creeping into the pit of her stomach. Just as she was
+about to give up the search, about to go and bury her face in her
+pillow, she remembered that her mother kept some photographs in her
+mirror-panelled wardrobe. She again took courage. Softly she entered the
+room of the sleeping Madame Nanteuil. With silent steps she crept over
+to the wardrobe, opened it slowly and noiselessly, and, standing on a
+chair, explored the top shelf, which was loaded with old cardboard
+boxes. She came upon an album which dated from the Second Empire, and
+which had not been opened for twenty years. She rummaged among a mass of
+letters, of bundles of receipts and Mont-de-Piete vouchers. Awakened by
+the light of the candle and by the mouse-like noise made by the seeker,
+Madame Nanteuil demanded:
+
+"Who is there?"
+
+Immediately, perceiving the familiar little phantom in her long
+nightgown, with a heavy plait of hair down her back, perched on a chair,
+she exclaimed:
+
+"It's you, Felicie? You are not ill, are you? What are you doing there?"
+
+"I am looking for something."
+
+"In my wardrobe?"
+
+"Yes, mamma."
+
+"Will you kindly go back to your bed! You will catch cold. Tell me at
+least what you are looking for. If it's the chocolate, it is on the
+middle shelf next to the silver sugar-basin."
+
+But Felicie had seized upon a packet of photographs, which she was
+rapidly turning over. Her impatient fingers rejected Madame Doulce,
+bedecked with lace, Fagette, radiant, her hair dissolving in its own
+brilliance; Tony Meyer, with close-set eyes and a nose drooping over his
+lips; Pradel, with his flourishing beard; Trublet, bald and snub-nosed;
+Monsieur Bondois, with timorous eye and straight nose set above a heavy
+moustache. Although not in a mood to bestow any attention upon Monsieur
+Bondois, she gave him a passing glance of hostility, and by chance let a
+drop of candle-grease disfigure his nose.
+
+Madame Nanteuil, who was now wide awake, could make nothing of her
+proceedings.
+
+"Felicie, why on earth are you poking about in my wardrobe like that?"
+
+Felicie, who at last held the photograph for which she had sought so
+assiduously, responded only by a cry of fierce delight and flew from the
+chair, taking with her her dead friend, and, inadvertently, Monsieur
+Bondois as well.
+
+Returning to the drawing-room she crouched down by the fireplace, and
+made a fire of paper, into which she cast Chevalier's three photographs.
+She watched them blazing, and when the three bits of cardboard, twisted
+and blackened, had flown up the chimney, and neither shape nor substance
+was left, she breathed freely. She really believed, this time, that she
+had deprived the jealous dead man of the material of his apparitions,
+and had freed herself from the dreaded obsession.
+
+On picking up her candlestick she saw Monsieur Bondois, whose nose had
+disappeared beneath a round blob of white wax. Not knowing what to do
+with him she threw him with a laugh into the still flaming grate.
+
+Returning to her room she stood before the looking-glass and drew her
+nightgown closely about her, in order to emphasize the lines of her
+body. A thought which occasionally flitted through her mind tarried
+there this time a little longer than usual.
+
+She was wont to ask herself:
+
+"Why is one made like that, with a head, arms, legs, hands, feet, chest,
+and abdomen? Why is one made like that and not otherwise? It's funny."
+
+And at the moment the human form seemed to her arbitrary, fantastic,
+alien. But her astonishment was soon over. And, as she looked at
+herself, she felt pleased with herself. She was conscious of a keen
+deep-seated delight in herself. She bared her breasts, held them
+delicately in the hollow of her hands, looked at them tenderly in the
+glass, as if they were not a part of herself, but something belonging
+to her, like two living creatures, like a pair of doves.
+
+After smiling upon them, she went back to bed. Waking late in the
+morning she felt surprised for a moment at being alone in her bed.
+Sometimes, in a dream, she would divide herself into two beings, and,
+feeling her own flesh, she would dream that she was being caressed by a
+woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+The dress rehearsal of _La Grille_ was called for two o'clock. As early
+as one o'clock Dr. Trublet had taken his accustomed place in Nanteuil's
+dressing-room.
+
+Felicie, who was being dressed by Madame Michon, reproached her doctor
+with having nothing to say to her. Yet it was she who, preoccupied, her
+mind concentrated upon the part which she was about to play, was not
+listening to him. She gave orders that nobody should be allowed to come
+into her dressing-room. For all that, she received Constantin Marc's
+visit with pleasure, for she found him sympathetic.
+
+He was getting excited. In order to conceal his agitation he made a
+pretence of talking about his woods in the Vivarais, and began to tell
+shooting stories and peasants' tales, which he did not finish.
+
+"I am in a funk," said Nanteuil. "And you, Monsieur Marc, don't you feel
+qualms in the stomach?"
+
+He denied feeling any anxiety. She insisted:
+
+"Now confess that you wish it were all over."
+
+"Well, since you insist, perhaps I would rather it were over."
+
+Whereupon Dr. Socrates, with a simple expression and in a quiet voice,
+asked him the following question:
+
+"Do you not believe that what must be accomplished has already been
+accomplished, and has been accomplished from all time?"
+
+And without waiting for a reply he added:
+
+"If the world's phenomena reach our consciousness in succession, we must
+not conclude from that that they are really successive, and we have
+still fewer reasons to believe that they are produced at the moment when
+we perceive them."
+
+"That's obvious," said Constantin Marc, who had not listened.
+
+"The universe," continued the doctor, "appears to us perpetually
+imperfect, and we are all under the illusion that it is perpetually
+completing itself. Since we perceive phenomena successively, we actually
+believe that they follow one another. We imagine that those which we no
+longer see are in the past, and those which we do not yet see are in the
+future. But it is possible to conceive beings built in such fashion that
+they perceive simultaneously what we regard as the past and the future.
+We may conceive beings who perceive phenomena in a retrograde order,
+and see them unroll themselves from our future to our past. Animals
+disposing of space otherwise than ourselves, and able, for instance, to
+move at a speed greater than that of light, would conceive an idea of
+the succession of phenomena which would differ greatly from our own."
+
+"If only Durville is not going to rag me on the stage!" exclaimed
+Felicie, while Madame Michon was putting on her stockings under her
+skirt.
+
+Constantin Marc assured her that Durville did not even dream of any such
+thing, and begged her not to be uneasy.
+
+And Dr. Socrates resumed his discourse.
+
+"We ourselves, of a clear night, when we gaze at Spica Virginis, which
+is throbbing above the top of a poplar, can see at one and the same time
+that which was and that which is. And it may be said with equal truth
+that we see that which is and that which will be. For if the star, such
+as it appears to us, represents the past as compared with the tree, the
+tree constitutes the future as compared with the star. Yet the star,
+which, from afar, shows us its tiny, fiery countenance, not as it is
+to-day, but as it was in the time of our youth, perhaps even before our
+birth, and the poplar-tree, whose young leaves are trembling in the
+fresh night air, come together within us in the same moment of time, and
+to us are present simultaneously. We say of a thing that it is in the
+present when we have a precise perception of it. We say that it is in
+the past when we preserve but an indistinct image of it. A thing may
+have been accomplished millions of years ago, yet if it makes the
+strongest possible impression upon us it will not be for us a thing of
+the past; it will be present. The order in which things revolve in the
+depths of the universe is unknown to us. We know only the order of our
+perceptions. To believe that the future does not exist, because we do
+not know it, is like believing that a book is not finished because we
+have not finished reading it."
+
+The doctor paused for a moment. And Nanteuil, in the silence which
+followed, heard the sound of her heart beating. She exclaimed:
+
+"Continue, my dear Socrates, continue, I beg you. If you only knew how
+much good you do me by talking! You think that I am not listening to a
+word you say. But it distracts me to hear you talking of far-away
+things; it makes me feel that there is something else besides my
+entrance; it prevents me from giving way to the blues. Talk about
+anything you like, but do not stop."
+
+The wise Socrates, who had doubtless anticipated the benign influence
+which his speech was exerting over the actress, resumed his lecture:
+
+"The universe is constructed inevitably as a triangle of which two
+angles and one side are given. Future things are determined. They are
+from that moment finished. They are as if they existed. Indeed, they
+exist already. They exist to such a degree that we know them in part.
+And, if that part is infinitesimal in proportion to their immensity, it
+is none the less very appreciable in proportion to the part of
+accomplished things of which we can have any knowledge. It is
+permissible to say that, for us, the future is not much more obscure
+than the past. We know that generations will follow generations in
+labour, joy and suffering. I look beyond the duration of the human race.
+I see the constellations slowly changing in the heavens those forms of
+theirs which seem immutable; I see the Wain unharnessed from its ancient
+team, the shield of Orion broken in twain, Sirius extinguished. We know
+that the sun will rise to-morrow and that for a long time to come it
+will rise every morning amid the dense clouds or in light mists."
+
+Adolphe Meunier entered discreetly on tiptoe.
+
+The doctor grasped his hand warmly.
+
+"Good day, Monsieur Meunier. We can see next month's new moon. We do not
+see her as distinctly as to-night's new moon, because we do not know in
+what grey or ruddy sky she will reveal her old saucepan-lid over my
+roof, amid the stove-flues capped with pointed hats and romantic hoods,
+to the gaze of the amorous cats. But this coming rising of the moon--if
+we were expert enough to know it in advance, in its most minute
+particulars, every one of which is essential, we should conceive as
+clear an idea of the night whereof I speak as of the night now with us;
+both would be equally present to us.
+
+"The knowledge that we have of the facts is the sole reason which leads
+us to believe in their reality. We know that certain facts are bound to
+occur. We must therefore believe them to be real. And, if they are real,
+they are realized. It is therefore credible, my dear Constantin Marc,
+that your play has been played a thousand years ago, or half an hour
+ago, which comes absolutely to the same thing. It is credible that we
+have all been dead for some time past. Think it, and your mind will be
+at rest."
+
+Constantin Marc, who had paid scant attention to his remarks and who did
+not perceive their relevance or their propriety, answered, in a somewhat
+irritable tone, that all that was to be found in Bossuet.
+
+"In Bossuet!" exclaimed the indignant physician. "I challenge you to
+show me anything resembling it in his works. Bossuet knew nothing of
+philosophy."
+
+Nanteuil turned to the doctor. She was wearing a big lawn bonnet with a
+tall round coif; it was bound tightly upon her head with a wide blue
+ribbon, and its lappets, one above another, fell on either side of her
+face, shading her forehead and cheeks. She had transformed herself into
+a fiery blonde. Reddish-brown hair fell in curls about her shoulders. An
+organdie neckerchief was crossed over her bosom and held at the waist by
+a broad purple girdle. Her white and pink striped petticoat, which
+flowed as though wet and clinging from the somewhat high waist, made her
+appear very tall. She looked like a figure in a dream.
+
+"Delage, too," she said, "rags one in the most rotten way. Have you
+heard what he did to Marie-Claire? They were playing together in _Les
+Femmes savantes_. He put an egg into her hand, on the stage. She
+couldn't get rid of it until the end of the act."
+
+On hearing the call boy's summons she went downstairs, followed by
+Constantin Marc. They heard the roar of the house, the mutterings of the
+monster, and it seemed to them that they were entering into the flaming
+mouth of the apocalyptic beast.
+
+_La Grille_ was favourably received. Coming at the end of the season,
+with little hope of a long run, it found favour with all. By the middle
+of the first act the public were conscious of the style, the poetry,
+and, here and there, the obscurities of the play. Thenceforward they
+respected it, pretended to enjoy it, and wished they could understand
+it. They forgave the play its slight dramatic value. It was literary, and
+for once the style found acceptance.
+
+Constantin Marc as yet knew no one in Paris. He had invited to the
+theatre three or four landed proprietors from the Vivarais, who sat
+blushing in the stalls in their white ties, rolled their round eyes, and
+did not dare to applaud. As he had no friends nobody dreamt of spoiling
+his success. And even in the corridors there were those who set his
+talent above that of other dramatists. Greatly excited, nevertheless, he
+wandered from dressing-room to dressing-room or collapsed into a chair
+at the back of the director's stage-box. He was worrying about the
+critics.
+
+"Set your mind at rest," Romilly told him. "They will say of your play
+the good or bad things they think of Pradel. And for the time being they
+think more ill than good of him."
+
+Adolphe Meunier informed him, with a pale smile, that the house was a
+good one, and that the critics thought the play showed very careful
+writing. He expected, in return, a few complimentary words concerning
+his _Pandolphe et Clarimonde_. But it did not enter Constantin Marc's
+head to vouchsafe them.
+
+Romilly shook his head.
+
+"We must look forward to slatings. Monsieur Meunier knows it well. The
+press has shown itself ferociously unjust to him."
+
+"Alas," sighed Meunier, "they will never say as many hard things about
+us as were said of Shakespeare and Moliere."
+
+Nanteuil had a great success which was marked less by vociferous calls
+before the curtain than by the deeper and more discreet approval of
+discriminating playgoers. She had revealed qualities with which she had
+not hitherto been credited; purity of diction, nobility of pose, and a
+proud, modest grace.
+
+On the stage, during the last interval, the Minister congratulated her
+in person. This was a sign that the public was favourably disposed, for
+Ministers never express individual opinions. Behind the Grand Master of
+the University pressed a flattering crowd of public officials, society
+folk, and dramatic authors. With arms extended toward her like
+pump-handles they all simultaneously assured her of their admiration.
+And Madame Doulce, stifled by their numbers, left on the buttons of the
+men's garments shreds of her countless adornments of cotton lace.
+
+The last act was Nanteuil's triumph. She obtained better things from the
+public than tears and shouts. She won from all eyes that moist yet
+tearless gaze, from every breast that deep yet almost silent murmur,
+which beauty alone has power to compel.
+
+She felt that she had grown immeasurably in a single instant, and when
+the curtain fell she whispered:
+
+"This time I've done it!"
+
+She was unrobing herself in her dressing-room, which was filled with
+baskets of orchids, bouquets of roses, and bunches of lilac, when a
+telegram was brought to her. She tore it open. It was a message from The
+Hague containing these words:
+
+"My heartfelt congratulations on your undoubted success--Robert."
+
+Just as she finished reading it Dr. Trublet entered the dressing-room.
+
+She flung her arms, burning with joy and fatigue, round his neck; she
+drew him to her warm moist bosom, and planted on his meditative
+Silenus-like face a smacking kiss from her intoxicated lips.
+
+Socrates, who was a wise man, took the kiss as a gift from the gods,
+knowing full well that it was not intended for him, but was dedicated to
+glory and to love.
+
+Nanteuil realized herself that in her intoxication she had perhaps
+charged her lips with too ardent a breath, for, throwing her arms apart,
+she exclaimed:
+
+"It can't be helped! I am so happy!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+At Easter an event of great importance increased her joy. She was
+engaged at the Comedie-Francaise. For some time past, without mentioning
+the subject, she had been trying for this engagement. Her mother had
+helped her in the steps she had taken. Madame Nanteuil was lovable now
+that she was loved. She now wore straight corsets and petticoats that
+she could display anywhere. She frequented the offices of the Ministry,
+and it is said that, being solicited by the deputy-chief of a department
+in the Beaux-Arts, she had yielded with very good grace. At least, so
+Pradel said.
+
+He would exclaim joyfully:
+
+"You wouldn't recognize her now, Mother Nanteuil! She has become most
+desirable, and I like her better than her little vixen of a daughter.
+She has a better disposition."
+
+Like the rest of them, Felicie had disdained, despised, disparaged the
+Comedie-Francaise. She had said, as all the others did: "I should
+hardly care to get into that house." And no sooner did she belong to it
+than she was filled with proud and joyful exultation. What increased her
+pleasure twofold was that she was to make her debut in _L'Ecole des
+Femmes_. She already studying the part of Agnes with an obscure old
+professor, Monsieur Maxime, of whom she thought highly because he was
+acquainted with all the traditions of the stage. At night she was
+playing Cecile in _La Grille_, and she was living in a feverish turmoil
+of work she received a letter in which Robert de Ligny informed her that
+he was returning to Paris.
+
+During his stay at The Hague he had made certain experiments which had
+proved to him the strength of his love for Felicie. He had had women who
+were reported to be pretty and pleasing. But neither Madame Bourmdernoot
+of Brussels, tall and fresh looking, nor the sisters Van Cruysen,
+milliners on the Vijver, nor Suzette Berger of the Folies-Marigny, then
+on tour through Northern Europe, had given him a sense of pleasure in
+its completeness. When in their company he had regretted Felicie, and
+had discovered that of all women, he desired her alone. Had it not been
+for Madame Bourmdernoot, the sisters Van Cruysen, and Suzette
+Berger, he would never have known how priceless Felicie Nanteuil was to
+him. If one must be literal it may be argued that he was unfaithful to
+her. That is the correct expression. There are others which come to the
+same thing and which are not such good form. But if one looks into the
+matter more closely he had not deceived her. He had sought her, he had
+sought her out of herself and had learned that he would find her in
+herself alone. In his futile wisdom he was almost angered and alarmed;
+he was uneasy at having to stake the multitude of his desires upon so
+slender a substance, in so unique and fragile a vessel. And he loved
+Felicie all the more because he loved her with a certain depth of rage
+and hatred.
+
+On the very day of his arrival in Paris, he made an appointment with her
+in a bachelor's flat, which a rich colleague in the Ministry of Foreign
+Affairs had placed at his disposal. It was situated in the Avenue de
+l'Alma, on the ground-floor of an attractive-looking house, and
+consisted of a couple of small rooms hung with a design of suns with
+brown hearts and golden rays, which rose, uniform, peaceful, and
+shadowless on the cheerful wall. The rooms were modern in style; the
+furniture was of a pale green, decorated with flowering branches; its
+outlines followed the gentle curves of the liliaceous plants, and
+assumed something of the tender feeling of moist vegetation. The
+cheval-glass leant slightly forward in its frame of bulbous plants of
+supple form, terminating in closed corollas, and in this frame the
+mirror had the coolness of water. A white bearskin lay stretched at the
+foot of the bed.
+
+"You! You! It's you!" was all she could say.
+
+She saw the pupils of his eyes shining and heavy with desire, and while
+she gazed at him a cloud gathered before her eyes. The subtle fire of
+her blood, the burning of her loins, the warm breath of her lungs, the
+fiery colour of her face, were all blended in her mouth, and she pressed
+on her lover's lips a long, long kiss, a kiss pregnant with all these
+fires and as fresh as a flower in the dew.
+
+They asked one another twenty things at a time, and their questions
+intermingled.
+
+"Were you wretched, Robert, when you were away from me?"
+
+"So you are making your debut at the Comedie?
+
+"Is The Hague a pretty place?"
+
+"Yes, a quiet little town. Red, grey, yellow houses, with stepped
+gables, green shutters, and geraniums at the windows."
+
+"What did you do there?"
+
+"Not much. I walked round the Vijver."
+
+"You did not go with women, I should hope?"
+
+"No, upon my word. How pretty you are, my darling! Are you well again
+now?"
+
+"Yes, I am cured."
+
+And in sudden entreaty she said:
+
+"Robert, I love you. Do not leave me. If you were to leave me I know for
+certain I could never take another lover. And what would become of me?
+You know that I can't do without love."
+
+He replied brusquely, in a harsh voice, that he loved her only too well,
+that he thought of nothing but of her.
+
+"I'm going crazy with it."
+
+His harshness delighted and reassured her better than the nerveless
+tenderness of oaths and promises could have done. She smiled and began
+to undress herself generously.
+
+"When do you make your debut at the Comedie?"
+
+"This very month."
+
+She opened her little bag, and took from it, together with her
+face-powder, her call for the rehearsal, which she held out to Robert.
+It was a source of unending delight to her to gaze admiringly at this
+document, because it bore the heading of the Comedie, with the remote
+and awe-inspiring date of its foundation.
+
+"You see, I make my debut as Agnes in _L'Ecole des Femmes_."
+
+"It's a fine part."
+
+"I believe you."
+
+And, while she was undressing, the lines surged to her lips, and she
+whispered them:
+
+  "Moi, j'ai blesse quelqu'un? fis-je tout etonnee
+   Oui, dit-elle, blesse; mais blesse tout de bon;
+   Et c'est l'homme qu'hier vous vites au balcon
+   Las! qui pourrait, lui dis-je, en avoir ete cause?
+   Sur lui, sans y penser, fis-je choir quelque chose?"
+
+"You see, I have not grown thin."
+
+  "Non, dit-elle, vos yeux ont fait ce coup fatal,
+   Et c'est de leurs regards qu'est venu tout son mal."
+
+"If anything, I am a little plumper, but not too much."
+
+  "He, mon Dieu! ma surprise est, fis-je, sans seconde;
+   Mes yeux ont-ils du mal pour en donner au monde?"
+
+He listened to the lines with pleasure. If on the one hand he did not
+know much more of the literature of bygone days or of French tradition
+than his youthful contemporaries, he had more taste and more lively
+interests. And, like all Frenchmen, he loved Moliere, understood him,
+and felt him profoundly.
+
+"It's delightful," he said. "Now, come to me."
+
+She let her chemise slip downwards with a calm and beneficent grace.
+But, because she wished to make herself desired, and because she loved
+comedy, she began Agnes' narrative:
+
+  "J'etais sur le balcon a travailler au frais,
+  Lorsque je vis passer sous les arbres d'aupres
+  Un jeune homme bien fait qui, rencontrant ma vue...."
+
+He called her, and drew her to him. She glided from his arms, and,
+advancing toward the mirror, she continued to recite and act before the
+glass.
+
+  "D'une humble reverence aussitot me salue."
+
+Bending her knee, at first slightly, then lower, then, with her left leg
+brought forward, and her right thrown, back, she curtsied deeply.
+
+  "Moi, pour ne point manquer a la civilite,
+  Je fis la reverence aussi de mon cote."
+
+He called her more urgently. But she dropped a second curtsy, the pauses
+of which she accentuated with amusing precision. And she went on
+reciting and dropping curtsies at the places indicated by the text and
+by the traditions of the stage.
+
+  "Soudain il me refait une autre reverence;
+  Moi, j'en refais de meme une autre en diligence;
+  Et lui, d'une troisieme aussitot repartant,
+  D'une troisieme aussi j'y repars a l'instant."
+
+She executed every detail of stage business, seriously and
+conscientiously, taking pains to give a perfect rendering. Her poses,
+some of which were disconcerting, requiring as they did a skirt to
+explain them, were almost all pretty, while all were interesting,
+inasmuch as they brought into relief the firm muscles under the soft
+envelope of a young body, and revealed at every movement correspondences
+and harmonies which are not commonly observed.
+
+When clothing her nudity with the propriety of her attitudes and the
+ingenuousness of her expressions she was the incarnation, through mere
+chance and caprice, of a gem of art, an allegory of Innocence in the
+style of Allegrain or Clodion. And the great lines of the comedy rang
+out with delicious purity from this animated figurine. Robert,
+enthralled in spite of himself, suffered her to go on to the very end.
+What entertained him above all was that the most public of all things, a
+stage scene, should be presented to him in so private and secret a
+fashion. And, while watching the ceremonious actions of this girl in all
+her nudity, he was at the same time revelling in the philosophical
+pleasure of discovering how dignity is produced in the best social
+circles.
+
+  "Il passe, vient, repasse et toujours de plus belle
+   Me fait a chaque fois une reverence nouvelle,
+   Et moi qui tous ses tours fixement regardais,
+   Nouvelle reverence aussi je lui rendais...."
+
+In the meantime she admired in the mirror her freshly-budded breasts,
+her supple waist, her arms, a trifle slender, round and tapering, and
+her smooth, beautiful knees; and, seeing all this subservient to the
+fine art of comedy, she became animated and exalted; a slight flush,
+like rouge, tinted her cheeks.
+
+  "Tant que si sur ce point la nuit ne fut venue,
+  Toujours comme cela je me serais tenue,
+  Ne voulaut point ceder, ni recevoir l'ennui
+  Qu'il me put estimer moins civile que lui...."
+
+He called to her from the bed, where he was lying on his elbow.
+
+"Now come!"
+
+Whereupon, full of animation and with heightened colour, she exclaimed:
+
+"Don't you think that I, too, love you!"
+
+She flung herself beside her lover. Supple and wholly surrendered, she
+threw back her head, offering to his kisses her eyes veiled with shadowy
+lashes and her half-parted lips, from which gleamed a moist flash of
+white.
+
+Of a sudden she started to her knees. Her staring eyes were filled with
+unspeakable terror. A hoarse scream escaped from her throat, followed by
+a wail as long drawn out and gentle as an organ note. Turning her head,
+she pointed to the white fur spread out at the foot of the bed.
+
+"There! There! He is lying there like a crouching dog, with a hole in
+his head. He is looking at me, with the blood trickling from the corner
+of his mouth."
+
+Her eyes, wide open, rolled up, showing the whites. Her body stretched
+backward like a bow, and, when it had recovered its suppleness, she fell
+as if dead.
+
+He bathed her temples with cold water, and brought her back to
+consciousness. In a childlike voice she whimpered that every joint in
+her body was broken. Feeling a burning sensation in the hollow of her
+hand, she looked, and saw that the palm was cut and bleeding.
+
+She said:
+
+"It's my nails, they've gone into my hand. See, my nails are full of
+blood!"
+
+She thanked him tenderly for his ministrations, and apologized sweetly
+for causing him so much trouble.
+
+"It was not for that you came, was it?"
+
+She tried to smile, and looked around her.
+
+"It's nice, here."
+
+Her gaze met the call to rehearsal lying open on the bedside table, and
+she sighed:
+
+"What is the use of my being a great actress if I am not happy?"
+
+Without realizing it, she was repeating word for word what Chevalier
+had said when she rejected his advances.
+
+Then, raising her still stupefied head from the pillow in which it had
+lain buried, she turned her mournful eyes toward her lover, and said to
+him resignedly:
+
+"We did indeed love each other, we two. It is over. We shall never again
+belong to each other; no, never. He forbids it!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note:
+
+The following typographical errors in the source text were corrected:
+
+Page  92:  disease.               ->  disease."
+Page 103:  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont  ->  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont
+Page 104:  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont  ->  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont
+Page 138:  dimunitive             ->  diminutive
+Page 141:  magificent             ->  magnificent
+Page 141:  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont  ->  Saint-Etienne-du-Mont
+
+The following inconsistent hyphenations in the source text were left
+unchanged:
+
+ill-will/illwill
+fire-place/fireplace
+box-wood/boxwood]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Mummer's Tale, by Anatole France
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